SOCIAL  ENVIRONMENT 

AND 

MORAL   PROGRESS 


Social  Environment 

and 

Moral  Progress 


By 

Alfred  Russel  Wallace 

O.M.,  D.C.L.Oxon, 
F.R.S.,  &c. 

Author  of  "The  Malay  Archipelago,"  "Darwinism/ 
"Man's  Place  in  the  Universe,"  "The  World  of  Life,' 

&.C.,  &C. 


New  York 

Cassell  and  Company 
1913 


Copyright,  1913,  by 
CASSELL  &  COMPANY 


Contents 

PART  I. -HISTORICAL 

CHAPTEB  PAQB 

1.  INTRODUCTORY  . 7 

2.  MORALITY  AS  BASED  UPON  CHARACTER  .  10 

3.  PERMANENCE  OF  CHARACTER  ....  14 

4.  PERMANENCE  OF  HIGH  INTELLECT   .    .  22 

5.  SPEECH  AND  WRITING  AS   PROOFS   OF 

INTELLIGENCE 36 

6.  SAVAGES  NOT  MORALLY  INFERIOR  TO 

CIVILIZED  RACES     ......      40 

7.  A    SELECTIVE    AGENCY    NEEDED    TO 

IMPROVE  CHARACTER 45 

8.  ENVIRONMENT  DURING  THE  NINETEENTH 

CENTURY 49 

9.  INSANITARY     DWELLINGS     AND     LIFE- 

DESTROYING  TRADES 56 

10.  ADULTERATION,    BRIBERY,    AND    GAM- 
BLING      64 

V 

259924 


Contents 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

11.  OUR    ADMINISTRATION    OF    "JUSTICE" 

is  IMMORAL 72 

12.  INDICATIONS    OF    INCREASING    MORAL 

DEGRADATION 77 

PART  II. -THEORETICAL 

13.  NATURAL  SELECTION  AMONG  ANIMALS      85 

14.  SELECTION  AS  MODIFIED  BY  MIND       .     104 

15.  THE    LAWS    OF    HEREDITY    AND    EN- 

VIRONMENT       115 

16.  MORAL    PROGRESS    THROUGH    A    NEW 

FORM  OF  SELECTION 139 

17.  How  TO  INITIATE  AN  ERA  OF  MORAL 

PROGRESS 166 

INDEX .    175 


Social  Environment  and 
Moral   Progress 

PART  I.-HISTORICAL 

CHAPTER  I 

INTRODUCTORY 

BEFORE  entering  on  the  question  of  the  rela- 
tion of  morality  to  our  existing  social  environ- 
ment, it  will  be  advisable  to  inquire  what 
we  mean  by  moral  progress,  and  what  evi- 
dence there  is  that  any  such  progress  has 
occurred  in  recent  times,  or  even  within  the 
period  of  well-established  history. 

1  By  morals  we  mean  right  conduct,  not  only 
in  our  immediate  social  relations,  but  also  in 
our  dealings  with  our  fellow-citizens  and 
with  the  whole  human  race.  It  is  based 
upon  the  possession  of  clear  ideals  as  to 
what  actions  are  right  and  what  are  wrong 
and  the  determination  of  our  conduct  by  a 
constant  reference  to  those  ideals. 

7 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

The  belief  was  once  prevalent,  and  is  still 
held  by  many  persons,  that  a  knowledge  of 
right  and  wrong  is  inherent  or  instinctive 
in  everyone,  and  that  the  immoral  person 
may  be  justly  punished  for  such  wrongdoing 
as  he  commits.  )  But  that  this  cannot  be 
wholly,  if  at  all,  true  is  shown  by  the  fact 
that  in  different  societies  and  at  different 
periods  the  standard  of  right  and  wrong 
changes  considerably.  That  which  at  one 
time  and  place  is  held  to  be  right  and  proper 
is,  at  another  time  or  place,  considered  to 
be  not  only  wrong,  but  one  of  the  greatest 
of  crimes.  The  most  striking  example  of 
this  change  of  opinion  is  that  as  to  slavery, 
which  was  held  to  be  quite  justifiable  by  the 
most  highly  civilised  people  of  antiquity,  and 
hardly  less  so  by  ourselves  within  the  mem- 
ory of  persons  still  living.  The  owners  of 
sugar  estates  in  Jamaica  cultivated  by  slaves 
were  not  stigmatized  as  immoral  by  their 
relatives  in  England  or  by  the  public  at  large; 
and  it  was  the  horror  excited  by  the  slave- 
trade  in  Africa,  and  in  the  "middle  passage" 
on  the  slave  ships,  rather  than  by  the  slavery 
itself,  that  so  excited  public  opinion  as  to 

8 


Introductory 

lead  to  the  abolition  first  of  the  one  and  then 
of  the  other. 

(We  are  obliged  to  conclude,  therefore,  that 
what  is  commonly  termed  morality  is  not 
wholly  due  to  any  inherent  perception  of 
what  is  right  or  wrong  conduct,  but  that  it 
is  to  some  extent  and  often  very  largely  a 
matter  of  convention,  varying  at  different 
times  and  places  in  accordance  with  the 
degree  and  kind  of  social  development  which 
has  been  attained  often  under  different  and 
even  divergent  conditions  of  existence.  The 
actual  morality  of  a  community  is  largely 
a  product  of  the  environment,  but  it  is  local 
and  temporary,  not  permanently  affecting  the 
character. 

To  bring  together  the  evidence  in  support 
of  this  view,  to  distinguish  between  what  is 
permanent  and  inherited  and  what  is  super- 
ficial and  not  inherited,  and  to  trace  out 
some  of  the  consequences  as  regards  what 
we  term  "morality"  is  the  purpose  of  the 
present  volume. 


CHAPTER  II 

MORALITY  AS  BASED  UPON  CHARACTER 

THOUGH  much  of  what  we  term  morality 
has  no  absolute  sanction  in  human  nature, 
yet  it  is  to  some  extent,  and  perhaps  very 
largely,  based  upon  it.  It  will  be  well,  there- 
fore, to  consider  briefly  the  nature  and  prob- 
able origin  of  what  we  term  "character" — 
in  individuals,  in  societies,  and  especially  in 
those  more  ancient  and  more  fundamental 
divisions  of  mankind  which  we  term 


"races." 


Character  may  be  defined  as  the  aggregate 
of  mental  faculties  and  emotions  which  con- 
stitute personal  or  national  individuality. 
It  is  very  strongly  hereditary,  yet  it  is  prob- 
ably subject  to  more  inherent  variation  than 
is  the  form  and  structure  of  the  body.  The 
combinations  of  its  constituent  elements  are 
so  numerous  as,  in  common  language,  to  be 
termed  infinite;  and  this  gives  to  each  per- 
son a  very  distinct  individuality,  as  mani- 

10 


Morality  Based  upon  Character 

fested  in  speech,  in  emotional  expression,  and 
in  action. 

The  mental  faculties  which  go  to  form  the 
"character"  of  each  man  or  woman  are  very 
numerous,  a  large  proportion  of  them  being 
such  as  are  required  for  the  preservation  of  the 
individual  and  of  the  race,  while  others  are 
pre-eminently  social  or  ethical.  These  latter, 
which  impel  us  to  truth,  to  justice,  and  to 
benevolence,  when  in  due  proportion  to  all 
the  other  mental  faculties,  go  to  form  what 
we  distinguish  as  a  good  or  moral  character, 
and  will  in  most  cases  result  in  actions  which 
meet  with  the  general  approval  of  that  sec- 
tion of  society  in  which  we  live;  and  this 
approval  reacts  upon  the  character  so  that 
it  often  appears  to  be  better  than  it  really  is. 

J3o  great  is  the  effect  of  this  approval  of 
our  fellows  that  it  sometimes  leads  to  behav- 
ior quite  different  from  what  it  would  be 
if  this  approval  were  absent.  -This  is  espe- 
cially the  case  when  the^approval  leads  to 
wealth  or  positions  of  dignity  or  advantage. 
Occasionally,  in  cases  of  this  kind,  the  indi- 
vidual cannot  resist  his  natural  impulses, 
and  then  acts  so  as  to  show  his  underlying 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

real  character.  We  term  such  persons  hypo- 
crites for  making  us  believe  that  they  were 
inherently  good,  instead  of  being  so  in  appear- 
ance only  when  the  good  action  was  profit- 
able to  them.  Hence  in  a  highly  complex 
state  of  civilization  it  becomes  exceedingly 
difficult  correctly  to  appraise  characters  as 
moral  or  immoral,  good  or  bad;  while  there 
is  no  such  difficulty  as  regards  the  intellec- 
tual and  emotional  aspects  of  character, 
which  are  less  influenced  by  the  general 
environment,  and  which  there  is  less  tempta- 
tion to  conceal. 

All  the  evidence  we  possess  tends  to  show 
that  although  the  actions  of  most  individuals 
are  to  a  considerable  extent  determined  by 
their  social  environment,  that  does  not  imply 
any  alteration  in  their  character.  Everyone's 
experience  of  life,  and  especially  the  example 
of  his  friends  and  associates,  leads  him  to 
repress  his  passions,  regulate  his  emotions, 
and  in  general  to  use  his  judgment  before 
acting,  so  as  to  secure  the  esteem  of  his 
fellows  and  greater  happiness  for  himself; 
and  these  restraints,  becoming  habitual,  may 
often  give  the  appearance  of  an  actual  change 


12 


Morality  Based  upon  Character 

of  character  till  some  great  temptation  or 
violent  passion  overcomes  the  usual  restraint 
and  exhibits  the  real  nature,  which  is  usually 
dormant. 

Now  it  is  this  inherent  and  unchangeable 
character  itself  that  tends  to  be  transmitted 
to  offspring,  and  this  being  the  case,  there 
can  be  no  progressive  improvement  in  char- 
acter without  some  selective  agency  tending 
to  such  improvement.  By  means  of  a  gen- 
eral discussion  of  the  nature  and  origin  of 
"Character,"  I  have  elsewhere  shown  that 
there  is  no  proof  of  any  real  advance  in  it 
during  the  whole  historical  period.*  I  show 
later  on  what  the  required  selective  agency  is, 
and  how  it  will  come  into  action  automat- 
ically when,  and  not  until,  our  social  system 
is  so  reformed  as  to  afford  suitable  condi- 
tions. (See  Chapter  XVI.) 

*  See  Character  and  Life,  edited  by  P.  L.  Parker,  pp.  19-31. 
(Williams  and  Norgate;  November,  1912.) 


CHAPTER  III 

PERMANENCE  OF  CHARACTER 

I  WILL  now  call  attention  to  a  few  of  the  facts 
which  lead  to  the  conclusion  as  to  the  sta- 
tionary condition  of  general  character  from 
the  earliest  periods  of  human  history,  and 
presumably  from  the  dawn  of  civilization. 
In  the  earliest  records  which  have  come  down 
to  us  from  the  past  we  find  ample  indications 
that  general  ethical  conceptions,  the  accepted 
standard  of  morality,  and  the  conduct  result- 
ing from  these,  were  in  no  degree  inferior  to 
those  which  prevail  to-day,  though  in  some 
respects  they  differed  from  ours. 

As  examples  of  great  moral  teachers  in 
very  early  times  we  have  Socrates  and  Plato, 
about  400  B.C.;  Confucius  and  Buddha,  one 
or  two  centuries  earlier;  Homer,  earlier  still; 
the  great  Indian  Epic,  the  Maha-Bharata, 
about  1500  B.C.  All  these  afford  indications 
of  intellectual  and  moral  character  quite 
equal  to  our  own;  while  their  lower  mani- 

14 


Permanence  of  Character 

festations,  as  shown  by  their  wars  and  love 
of  gambling,  were  no  worse  than  correspond- 
ing immoralities  today. 

In  the  beautiful  translation  by  the  late 
Mr.  Romesh  Dutt,  of  such  portions  of  the 
Maha-Bharata  as  are  best  fitted  to  give 
English  readers  a  proper  conception  of  the 
whole  work,  there  is  a  striking  episode  en- 
titled "Woman's  Love,"  in  which  the  heroine, 
a  princess,  by  repeated  petitions  and  reason- 
ings persuades  Yama,  the  god  of  death,  to 
give  back  her  husband's  spirit  to  the 
body.  It  is  described  in  the  following 
verses: 

"And  the  sable  King  was  vanquished,  and  he 

turned  on  her  again, 
And  his  words  fell  on  Savitri  like  the  cooling 

summer  rain: 
'Noble  woman,  speak  thy  wishes,  name  thy 

boon  and  purpose  high, 
What  the  pious  mortal  asketh  gods  in  heaven 

may  not  deny!' 

"Thou    hast,'    so    Savitri    answered,    'granted 

father's  realm  and  might, 
To  his   vain   sightless   eyeballs   hath   restored 

the  blessed  light; 
15 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

Grant  him  that  the  line  of  monarchs  may  not  all 

untimely  end, 
That  his  kingdom  to  Satyavan  and  Savitri's 

sons  descend!' 

"Have  thy  wishes/  answered  Yama;  'thy  good 

lord  shall  live  again, 
He  shall  live  to  be  a  father,  and  your  children, 

too,  shall  reign; 
For  a  woman's  troth  endureth  longer  than  the 

fleeting  breath, 
And  a  woman's  love  abideth  higher  than  the 

doom  of  death.'" 


And  when  at  the  end  of  the  epic,  the  kings 
and  warriors  welcome  each  other  in  the  spirit 
world,  we  find  the  following  noble  conception 
of  the  qualities  and  actions  which  give  them 
a  place  there: 

"These  and  other  mighty  warriors,  in  the  earthly 

battle  slain, 
By  their  valor  and  their  virtue  walk  the  bright 

ethereal  plain! 
They  have  lost  their  mortal  bodies,  crossed  the 

radiant  gate  of  heaven, 

For  to  win  celestial  mansions  unto  mortals  it  is 
given! 

16 


Permanence  of  Character 

Let  them  strive  by  kindly  action,  gentle  speech, 

endurance  long, 
Brighter  life  and  holier  future  unto  sons  of  men 

belong!" 

Mr.  Dutt  informs  us  that  he  has  not  only 
reproduced,  as  nearly  as  possible,  the  metre 
of  the  original,  but  has  aimed  at  giving  us  a 
literal  translation.  No  one  can  read  his 
beautiful  rendering  without  feeling  that  the 
people  it  describes  were  our  intellectual  and 
moral  equals. 

The  wonderful  collection  of  hymns  known 
as  the  Vedas  is  a  vast  system  of  religious 
teaching  as  pure  and  lofty  as  those  of  the 
finest  portions  of  the  Hebrew  scriptures.  A 
few  examples  from  the  translation  by  Sir 
Monier  Monier- Williams  will  show  that  its 
various  writers  were  fully  our  equals  in 
their  conceptions  of  the  universe,  and  of  the 
Deity,  expressed  in  the  finest  poetic  language. 
The  following  is  a  portion  of  a  hymn  to  "The 
Investing  Sky": 

"The  mighty  Varuna,  who  rules  above,  looks  down 
Upon  these  worlds,  his  kingdom,  as  if  close  at 
hand. 

17 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

When  men  imagine  they  do  aught  by  stealth, 

he  knows  it. 

No  one  can  stand  or  walk,  or  softly  glide  along 
Or  hide  in  darkness,  or  lurk  in  secret  cell 
But  Varuna  detects  him  and  his  movements 

spies. 


This  boundless  earth  is  his, 
His  the  vast  sky,  whose  depth  no  mortal  e'er  can 

fathom. 

Both  oceans  find  a  place  within  his  body,  yet 
In  the  small  pool  he  lies  contained;  whoe'er 

should  flee 
Far,  far  beyond  the  sky  would  not  escape  the 

grasp 

Of  Varuna,  the  king.  His  messengers  descend 
Countless  from  his  abode — for  ever  traversing 
This  world,  and  scanning  with  a  thousand  eyes 

its  inmates. 
Whatever  exists  within  this  earth,  and  all  within 

the  sky, 

Yea,  all  that  is  beyond  King  Varuna  perceives. 
May  thy  destroying  snares  cast  sevenfold  round 

the  wicked, 
Entangle  liars,  but  the  truthful  spare,  O  King." 

The  following  passage  from  a  "Hymn  to 
Death,"  shows  a  perfect  confidence  in  that 

it 


Permanence  of  Character 

persistence  of  the  human  personality  after 
death,  which  is  still  a  matter  of  doubt  and 
discussion  todayi 

"To  Yama,  mighty  king,  he  gifts  and  homage 

paid. 
He  was  the  first  of  men  that  died,  the  first  to 

brave 
Death's  rapid  rushing  stream,  the  first  to  point 

the  road 
To  heaven,  and  welcome  others  to  that  bright 

abode. 
No  power  can  rob  us  of  the  home  thus  won  by 

thee. 
O  king,  we  come;  the  born  must  die,  must  tread 

the  path 
That  thou  hast  trod — the  path  by  which  each 

race  of  men, 
In  long  succession,  and  our  fathers,  too,  have 

passed. 
Soul  of  the  dead!  depart;  fear  not  to  take  the 

road — 
The  ancient  road — by  which  thy  ancestors  have 

gone; 
Ascend  to  meet  the  god — to  meet  thy  happy 

fathers, 

Who  dwell  in  bliss  with  him. 
Return  unto  thy  home,  O  soul!    Thy  sin  and 

shame 

19 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

Leave  thou  behind  on  earth;  assume  a  shining 

form — 
Thy  ancient  shape — refined  and  from  all  taint 

set  free." 

In  this  we  find  many  of  the  essential  teach- 
ings of  the  most  advanced  religious  thinkers 
• — the  immediate  entrance  to  a  higher  life, 
the  recognition  of  friends,  the  persistence  of 
the  human  form,  and  the  shining  raiment, 
typical  of  the  loss  of  earthly  taint. 

But  besides  these  special  deities,  we  find 
also  the  recognition  of  the  one  supreme  God, 
as  in  the  following  hymn: 

"What  god  shall  we  adore  with  sacrifice? 
Him  let  us  praise,  the  golden  child  that  rose 
In  the  beginning,  who  was  born  the  Lord — 
The  one  sole  lord  of  all  that  is — who  made 
The  earth,  and  formed  the  sky,  who  giveth  life, 
Who  giveth  strength,  whose  bidding  gods  revere, 
Whose  hiding  place  is  immortality, 
Whose  shadow,  death;  who  by  his  might  is  king 
Of  all  the  breathing,  sleeping,  waking  world — 
Who  governs  men  and  beasts;  whose  majesty 
These  snowy  hills,  this  ocean  with  its  rivers, 
Declare;  of  whom  these  spreading  regions  form 
The  arms  by  which  the  firmament  is  strong, 
Earth  firmly  planted,  and  the  highest  heavens 

20 


Permanence  of  Character 

Supported,  and  the  clouds  that  fill  the  air 
Distributed   and   measured   out;   to  whom 
Both  earth  and  heaven,  established  by  his  will, 
Look  up  with  trembling  mind;  in  whom  revealed 
The  rising  sun  shines  forth  above  the  world." 

If  we  make  allowance  for  the  very  limited 
knowledge  of  Nature  at  this  early  period,  we 
must  admit  that  the  mind  which  conceived 
and  expressed  in  appropriate  language  such 
ideas  as  are  everywhere  apparent  in  these 
Vedic  hymns  could  not  have  been  in  any 
way  inferior  to  those  of  the  best  of  our  relig- 
ious teachers  and  poets  —  to  our  Miltons 
and  our  Tennysons. 


21 


CHAPTER  IV 

PERMANENCE  OF  HIGH  INTELLECT 

ACCOMPANYING  this  fine  literature  and  moral 
teaching  in  Ancient  India  was  a  civilization 
equal  to  that  of  early  classical  races,  in  grand 
temples,  forts  and  palaces,  weapons  and 
implements,  jewelry  and  exquisite  fabrics. 
Their  architecture  was  highly  decorative  and 
peculiar,  and  has  continued  to  quite  recent 
times.  Owing  perhaps  to  the  tropical  or 
sub-tropical  climate,  with  marked  wet  and 
dry  seasons,  the  oldest  buildings  that  have 
survived,  even  as  ruins,  are  less  ancient  than 
those  of  Greece  or  Rome — but  those  corre- 
sponding in  age  to  the  period  of  our  Gothic 
cathedrals  are  immensely  numerous,  and  show 
an  originality  of  design,  a  wealth  of  orna- 
ment, and  a  perfection  of  workmanship  equal 
to  those  of  any  other  buildings  in  the  world. 
Two  other  great  civilizations  of  which  we 
have  authentic  records  are  those  of  Egypt 


22 


Permanence  of  High  Intellect 

and  Mesopotamia,  both  of  which  appear  to 
have  been  much  older  than  those  of  India 
or  Greece.  But  whereas  Egypt  has  left  us 
the  most  continuous  series  of  tombs,  temples, 
and  palaces  in  the  world,  abundant  works  of 
art  in  statues  and  sculptures,  together  with 
characteristic  reliefs  and  wall  paintings,  show- 
ing the  whole  public  and  domestic  life  of  the 
people,  Mesopotamia  is  represented  only  by 
vast  masses  of  ruins  on  the  sites  of  the  ancient 
cities  of  Nineveh  and  Babylon,  from  which 
have  been  disinterred  many  fine  statues  and 
reliefs,  exhibiting  a  very  distinct  style  of  art. 
For  more  than  2,000  years  the  history  and 
remains  of  this  once  greatest  of  civilizations 
was  absolutely  unknown,  except  by  a  few 
doubtful  facts  and  names  in  Greek  and 
Hebrew  writings.  But  during  the  latter  half 
of  the  nineteenth  century  a  band  of  explorers 
and  students,  such  as  Layard  and  Rawlin- 
son,  made  known,  first  the  works  of  art,  and, 
latterly,  an  enormous  quantity  of  small  bricks 
and  stone  slabs,  thickly  covered  with  a 
peculiar  kind  of  writing  known  as  the  cunei- 
form inscriptions,  which,  after  an  enormous 
amount  of  labor,  have  at  length  been  trans- 

23 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

lated.  Whole  libraries  of  these  brick-books 
have  been  discovered,  and  as  the  reading  and 
translating  goes  on  we  obtain  a  knowledge 
of  the  history,  laws,  customs,  and  daily  life 
of  this  ancient  people  almost  equal  to  that 
we  now  possess  of  the  ancient  Indians  and 
Egyptians. 

For  our  present  purpose,  however,  Egyp- 
tian civilization  is  the  most  important,  be- 
cause it  presents  us  with  the  most  definite 
proof  of  the  attainment  of  a  high  degree  of 
what  is  specially  scientific  attainment  at  the 
very  dawn  of  historical  knowledge.  This  is 
well  exhibited  by  that  most  wonderful  work 
of  constructive  art — the  Great  Pyramid  of 
Gizeh — which,  though  not  quite  the  earliest, 
is  the  largest  and  most  remarkable  of  about 
seventy  pyramids  in  various  parts  of  Egypt, 
and  has  been  more  thoroughly  explored  and 
studied,  both  as  to  its  proportions,  con- 
struction and  uses,  than  any  of  the  others. 

This  pyramid  is  known  historically  to  have 
been  built  by  the  order  of  King  Cheops  (or 
Khufu),  and  the  date  of  its  design  and  erec- 
tion can  be  pretty  accurately  fixed  as  about 
3700  B.C.,  or  nearly  2,000  years  earlier  than 

24 


Permanence  of  High  Intellect 

that  of  the  civilization  depicted  in  the  Indian 
and  Greek  epics.  The  internal  structure  of 
this  pyramid  is  its  most  interesting  feature, 
because  it  shows  clearly  that  it  was  designed 
to  be  not  only  the  tomb  of  the  king  who  built 
it,  but  also  a  true  astronomical  observatory 
during  his  life.  This  has  been  denied  by  some 
modern  historians.  In  Harmsworth's  His- 
tory of  the  World  (p.  2034)  it  is  said:  "For  the 
pyramids  are  nothing  but  tombs.  They  have 
no  astronomical  meaning  or  intention  what- 
ever." And  then,  after  referring  to  the  ideas 
of  Piazzi  Smyth  and  others  as  "vain  imag- 
inings," it  is  added:  "There  is  nothing  mar- 
vellous about  these  great  tombs  except  their 
size  and  the  accuracy  of  their  building." 
An  almost  exactly  similar  statement  is  made 
in  the  great  Historian's  History  of  .the  World 
and  in  "Chambers's  Encyclopaedia." 

If  the  writers  of  these  histories  had  read 
Mr.  R.  A.  Proctor's  book,  The  Great  Pyramid: 
Observatory,  Tomb,  and  Temple,  they  would 
have  known  that  this  statement  is  entirely 
erroneous.  The  size,  shape,  and  angles  of  the 
internal  passages  have  been  described  and 
measured  by  many  competent  students,  among 

25 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

the  most  careful  and  exact  of  whom  was 
Piazzi  Smyth,  then  Astronomer  Royal  of 
Scotland.  It  is  true  he  had  many  "vain 
imaginings,"  but  his  measurements  were 
among  the  most  trustworthy.  The  "pyra- 
mid religion,"  which  he  helped  to  establish 
by  a  series  of  "coincidences"  in  the  dimensions 
of  various  parts  of  the  pyramid  with  astro- 
nomical dimensions,  of  which  the  pyramid 
builders  could  have  had  no  knowledge  what- 
ever (such  as  the  distance  of  the  sun,  the  pre- 
cession of  the  equinoxes,  etc.),  was  no  doubt 
a  "vain  imagining,"  but  he  frankly  claimed 
it  as  a  divine  inspiration.  All  these  are  re- 
jected by  Mr.  Proctor,  who  clearly  explains 
the  purpose  of  the  greater  part  of  the  internal 
structure  as  only  an  experienced  practical 
astronomer  could  do.  I  will  now  state  as 
briefly  as  possible  what  are  the  well-estab- 
lished facts  as  well  as  the  conclusions  at 
which  Mr.  Proctor  arrives. 

The  Great  Pyramid  and  the  two  smaller 
ones  near  it,  forming  the  pyramids  of  Gizeh, 
are  placed  on  a  small  rocky  plateau  near  the 
apex  of  the  delta  of  the  Nile.  The  largest 
of  these  is  situated  so  that  its  northern  face 

26 


Permanence  of  High  Intellect 

rises  from  the  very  edge  of  this  plateau. 
The  reason  of  this  seems  to  have  been  that  the 
builders  wished  to  place  it  as  nearly  as  possible 
on  the  30th  parallel  of  latitude.  It  is  really 
about  a  mile  and  a  third  south  of  that  parallel, 
and  it  is  shown  that  such  an  error  is  a  small 
one  for  that  early  period,  and  would  matter 
but  very  little  for  the  purpose  required. 
The  next  feature  is  that  it  is  truly  oriented; 
that  is,  the  four  sides  run  north  and  south, 
east  and  west.  It  is  also  a  true  square,  the 
four  sides  being  of  equal  length,  and  the  four 
corners  are  on  a  truly  level  plane. 

The  first  thing  the  builders  had  to  do  was 
to  get  a  true  meridian  line,  and  they  could 
have  done  this  in  two  ways — by  observations 
of  the  sun  or  of  the  polestar,  the  latter  being 
much  the  more  accurate,  though  more  labo- 
rious and  costly.  At  the  time  the  pyramid 
was  built  the  polestar  was  Alpha  Draconis, 
which  was  farther  from  the  pole  than  our 
polestar  and  revolved  around  the  true  pole 
in  a  circle  of  7°  24'  in  diameter.  In  order  to 
observe  the  direction  of  this  star  at  its  lowest 
point,  the  builders  excavated  in  the  solid 
rock  a  tunnel  about  4  feet  in  diameter,  so 

27 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

as  to  keep  this  star  visible  each  day  at  the 
lowest  point  of  its  circuit.  This  tunnel  ex- 
tended 350  feet  through  the  rock  to  a  point 
nearly  under  the  centre  of  the  pyramid,  where, 
by  a  small  vertical  boring,  a  plumb-line 
could  have  been  dropped  so  as  to  obtain 
the  exact  line  of  the  meridian  on  the  surface, 
and  afterwards  on  each  successive  step  of  the 
pyramid  as  it  was  built  up.  While  the  build- 
ing went  on  the  sloping  tunnel  was  continued 
backwards  to  its  northern  face,  and  a  tunnel 
ascending  to  the  south  was  formed  of  the 
same  size  and  making  the  same  angle  with  the 
horizon.  This  had  puzzled  all  previous  ex- 
plorers of  the  pyramid  till  Mr.  Proctor  showed 
that,  by  stopping  up  the  downward  passage 
at  the  angle  and  filling  the  hollow  with  water, 
the  polestar  could  be  observed  by  reflexion 
and  thus  give  the  exact  direction  of  the  merid- 
ian on  the  upper  surface  of  the  pyramid 
with  extreme  accuracy,  as  it  was  built  up 
slowly  year  by  year. 

But  at  a  distance  of  127  feet  a  new  feature 
appears.  The  ascending  tunnel  is  changed 
into  what  is  called  the  Great  Gallery,  which, 
while  continuing  exactly  the  same  floor  line 

28 


Permanence  of  High  Intellect 

as  the  tunnel,  is  suddenly  raised  to  a  height 
of  28  feet,  with  a  width  of  7  feet  on  the  floor 
and  3^  feet  at  the  top.  Along  each  side 
there  is  a  ledge  or  seat,  20  inches  broad  and 
21  inches  high.  The  sides  do  not  slope  in- 
wards, but  are  formed  of  seven  courses  of 
stone,  each  one  overlapping  the  one  below 
by  about  3  inches.  The  whole  of  this  gallery, 
or  inclined  corridor,  is  formed  of  limestone, 
beautifully  smooth,  or  even  polished.  The 
length  of  this  gallery  is  156  feet,  and  its 
floor  terminated  at  the  platform  of  the 
pyramid,  upon  the  central  line  from  east  to 
west,  when  it  had  reached  two-thirds  of  its 
total  height.  This  is  on  the  level  of  the 
King's  Chamber;  and  it  was  probably  only 
after  the  king  was  dead  and  his  body  em- 
balmed and  placed  in  his  sarcophagus  that  the 
pyramid  was  completed,  the  openings  of  the 
passages  carefully  closed  up,  and  the  whole 
exterior  covered  with  a  smooth  casing  of  stone, 
very  small  portions  of  which  now  remain. 
There  are  two  other  features  of  this  gallery 
which  have  puzzled  the  merely  antiquarian 
explorers.  These  are  square  holes  cut  in  the 
sloping  benches  close  to  the  side  walls,  and 

29 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

about  5^£  feet  apart,  there  being  eighteen  on 
each  side  exactly  opposite  each  other.  On 
each  side  of  the  gallery,  about  half-way  up, 
is  a  longitudinal  groove,  which  would  serve  to 
carry  transverse  screens  which  could  be  slid 
up  or  down  and  easily  wedged  in  position  in 
order  to  mark  exactly  the  central  line,  like 
the  cross  hairs  in  an  astronomical  telescope. 
The  holes  on  the  benches  would  serve  to 
carry  cross  seats  on  which  the  observer  could 
be  firmly  and  comfortably  seated  while  ob- 
serving a  transit  of  sun,  star  or  planet. 

Being  open  to  the  south,  the  Great  Gallery 
would  give  a  magnificent  view  of  the  south- 
ern sky,  and  enable  observers  to  determine 
the  altitudes  and  azimuths  of  many  stars, 
and  of  the  superior  planets  Mars,  Jupiter, 
and  Saturn.  The  star  Alpha  Centauri,  which 
was  at  that  period  of  the  first  magnitude, 
though  now  much  diminished  in  brightness, 
would,  when  crossing  the  meridian,  have 
been  situated  about  the  centre  of  the  field  of 
view  as  seen  from  this  remarkable  feature 
of  the  pyramid  which,  Mr.  Proctor  considers, 
was  the  finest  transit-instrument  ever  con- 
structed for  naked-eye  observations.  Tycho 

30 


Permanence  of  High  Intellect 

Brahe,  with  his  celebrated  Quadrant  at  Uran- 
ienburg,  did  not  attain  such  a  degree  of 
accuracy  as  did  these  Eastern  astronomers 
nearly  6,000  years  ago.  One  great  superior- 
ity of  the  subterranean  observatory  over  any 
open-air  observations  that  can  be  made 
without  telescopes  is,  that  by  closing  up  the 
end,  except  for  the  small  aperture  required 
to  see  the  object,  the  brighter  stars  could  be 
well  observed  in  the  daytime. 

When  we  remember  that  the  Great  Pyra- 
mid covers  13^  acres  of  ground,  that  it  is 
truly  square  and  on  a  truly  horizontal  base, 
that  each  side  is  accurately  directed  to  a 
point  of  the  compass,  that  the  angle  of  its 
slope  is  such  that  the  area  of  each  of  the 
four  triangular  faces  is  equal  to  that  of  a 
square  whose  sides  are  equal  to  the  height 
of  the  pyramid;  and,  further,  that  the  slope 
of  the  long  descending  tunnel  is  precisely 
such  as  to  point  accurately  to  the  polestar 
of  the  epoch  at  the  lowest  part  of  its  circuit 
round  the  true  pole;  and,  lastly,  that  all  this 
could  only  be  done,  as  accurately  as  it  has 
been  done,  by  the  system  of  subterranean 
tunnels  and  galleries  that  actually  exists, 

31 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

while  almost  all  the  details  of  their  con- 
struction are  shown  to  be  adapted  for  astro- 
nomical observations  of  the  nature  required, 
the  conclusion  becomes  irresistible  that  they 
were  designed  and  used  for  such  observa- 
tions, and  that  by  no  other  means  could  the 
same  amount  of  accuracy  have  been  at- 
tained. 

I  have  given  a  rather  full  account  of  what 
the  Pyramid  builders  really  did,  because  it 
forms  a  very  important  part  of  the  argu- 
ment I  am  developing  as  to  the  stationary 
condition  of  the  human  intellect  during  the 
historical  period. 

The  great  majority  of  educated  persons 
hold  the  opinion  that  our  wonderful  discov- 
eries and  inventions  in  every  department  of 
art  and  science  prove  that  we  are  really  more 
intellectual  and  wiser  than  the  men  of  past 
ages — that  our  mental  faculties  have  in- 
creased in  power.  But  this  idea  is  totally 
unfounded.  We  are  the  inheritors  of  the 
accumulated  knowledge  of  all  the  ages;  and 
it  is  quite  possible,  and  even  probable,  that 
the  earliest  steps  taken  in  the  accumulation 
of  this  vast  mental  treasury  required  even 

32 


\ 


Permanence  of  High  Intellect 

more  thought  and  a  higher  intellectual  power 
than  any  of  those  taken  in  our  own  era. 

We  can  perhaps  best  understand  this  by 
supposing  any  one  of  our  great  men  of  science 
to  have  been  born  and  educated  in  one  of 
the  earliest  of  the  civilizations.  If  Newton 
had  been  born  in  Egypt  in  the  era  of  the 
Pyramid  builders,  when  there  were  no  such 
sciences  as  mathematics,  perhaps  even  no 
decimal  notation  which  makes  arithmetic  so 
easy  to  us,  he  could  probably  have  done 
nothing  more  than  they  have  actually  done. 
In  building  up  the  sciences  each  of  the  early 
steps  was  the  work  of  a  genius.  But  now 
that  there  have  been  nearly  a  hundred  cen- 
turies of  discovery  and  specialization  by 
thousands  or  even  millions  of  workers,  that 
by  means  of  writing  and  of  the  printing-press 
every  discovery  is  quickly  made  known,  and 
that  ever  larger  and  larger  numbers  devote 
their  lives  to  study,  the  rate  of  progress 
becomes  quicker  and  quicker,  till  the  total 
result  is  amazingly  great.  But  that  does  not 
prove  any  superiority  of  the  later  over  the  ear- 
lier discoveries.  There  is,  therefore,  no  proof 
of  continuously  increasing  intellectual  power. 

33 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

But  we  have  now  evidence  of  another 
kind,  which  adds  to  the  force  of  this  argument. 

Quite  recently,  papyri  have  been  discov- 
ered which  give  us  information  as  to  the 
ideas,  the  beliefs,  and  the  aspirations  of  a 
period  even  earlier  than  that  of  the  Great 
Pyramid.  The  result  of  the  study  of  these 
and  other  records  of  early  Egypt  is  thus 
stated  by  Professor  Adolf  Erman  in  The 
Historian's  History  of  the  World: 

"But  when  one  considers  the  ancient  resident  of 
the  valley  of  the  Nile  as  a  human  being,  with 
desires,  emotions,  and  aspirations  almost  precisely 
like  our  own;  a  man  struggling  to  solve  the  same 
problems  of  practical  Socialism  that  we  are  strug- 
gling for  today  —  then,  and  then  only,  can  the 
lessons  of  ancient  Egyptian  history  be  brought 
home  to  us  in  their  true  meaning,  and  with  their 
true  significance.  And_clearest  of  all  will  that 
significance^be,  perhaps,  if  we  constantly  bear  in 
mind  the  possibility  that  the  whole  sweep  of 
Egyptian  history,  during  the  three  or  four  thou- 
sand years  that  separated  the  Pyramid  builders 
from  the  contemporaries  of  Alexander,  was  a 
time  of  national  decay — a  dark  age,  if  you  will — 
in  Egyptian  history." 

That  a  great  historian,  from  a  study  of 

34 


Permanence  of  High  Intellect 

the  ideas  and  social  aspirations  of  the  earliest 
known  civilizations,  should  have  arrived  at 
similar  views  as  to  the  identity  of  their 
mental  capacity  with  our  own  as  I  have 
deduced  from  their  scientific  attainments, 
must  be  held  to  be  a  very  strong  argument 
in  support  of  the  accuracy  of  our  independent 
conclusions. 


35 


CHAPTER  V 

SPEECH  AND  WRITING  AS  PROOFS  OF 
INTELLIGENCE 

THERE  is  yet  another  proof  that  the  faculties 
of  mankind  at  a  very  early  epoch  were  fully 
equal  to  those  of  our  own  time.  There  is 
perhaps  nothing  more  difficult  in  its  nature, 
more  utterly  beyond  the  mere  lower  animal, 
than  the  faculty  of  articulate  speech  pos- 
sessed by  every  race  of  mankind.  We  cannot 
but  believe  that  its  acquisition  was  an  ex- 
tremely slow  process,  and  that  it  is  rendered 
possible  by  special  cerebral  developments 
giving  the  necessary  mental  power  for  its 
acquirement. 

How  long  a  process  this  would  be,  it  is 
impossible  to  say,  but  it  would  certainly 
have  had  to  reach  a  high  degree  of  perfec- 
tion before  the  equally  difficult  process  of 
inventing  a  mode  of  writing  could  have  been 
brought  to  such  perfection  as  to  facilitate 

36 


Speech,  Writing  and  Intelligence 

the  further  development  of  the  higher  facul- 
ties through  poetry  on  the  one  hand  and  the 
preservation  of  facts  and  discoveries,  as  well 
as  trains  of  reasoning,  on  the  other. 

Now,  I  wish  to  call  attention  to  the  very 
important  fact  that  the  origin  and  develop- 
ment of  speech,  and  later,  of  writing,  were 
apparently  almost  simultaneous,  and  cer- 
tainly quite  independent  of  each  other,  in 
countries  not  very  distant  apart.  This  is 
shown  by  the  radical  diversity  of  the  dif- 
ferent groups  of  languages  in  Europe,  Eastern 
Asia,  and  North  Africa,  and  the  equal  diver- 
sity of  Egyptian,  Assyrian,  and  Chinese  writ- 
ing. All  other  written  characters  are  be- 
lieved to  be  derived  from  one  or  other  of  these, 
and  it  is  known  that  the  forms  and  peculiari- 
ties of  alphabetic  characters  have  been  greatly 
modified  by  the  various  materials  employed, 
such  as  wood  and  stone  slabs,  clay,  or  wax; 
papyrus,  paper,  or  parchment;  and  whether 
engraved,  impressed,  or  painted,  whether  writ- 
ten with  a  reed  or  quill  pen,  or  with  a  small 
brush. 

But  if  intellectual  man  as  a  species  of 
mammal  had  developed  by  the  preservation 

37 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

of  variations  of  survival-value,  we  should  ex- 
pect to  find  such  an  important  faculty  as 
speech  to  have  originated  in  one  centre  and 
to  have  spread  rapidly  over  the  world  with 
only  slight  modifications  in  isolated  com- 
munities. The  fundamental  diversities  we 
find  seem  to  accord  better  with  the  con- 
ception that  when,  as  a  mere  animal,  his 
material  organism  had  reached  the  required 
degree  of  perfection,  there  occurred  the  spirit- 
ual influx  which  alone  enabled  him  to  begin 
that  course  of  intellectual  and  moral  develop- 
ment, and  that  marvellous  power  over  the 
forces  of  Nature,  in  which  speech  and  writing, 
followed  by  printing,  have  been  such  im- 
portant factors. 

In  order  for  man  to  develop  speech,  he 
must  have  possessed  a  brain  and  an  intellect 
far  above]  that  of  the  brutes.  As  in  the  more 
fundamental  problem  of  the  origin  of  life, 
it  is  admitted  that  organization  is  a  product 
of  life — not  life  of  organization;  so  we  must 
believe  that  speech  was  a  product  of  a  brain 
and  an  intellect  sufficient  for  their  develop- 
ment. But  such  brain  and  intellect  were  not 
necessary  for  the  lower  animals,  which  have 

38 


Speech,  Writing  and  Intelligence 

reached  their  highest  lines  of  development 
in  the  dog,  horse,  elephant,  and  ape  without 
making  any  definite  approach  to  the  acquire- 
ment of  such  higher  faculties. 


39 


CHAPTER  VI 

SAVAGES  NOT  MORALLY  INFERIOR  TO 
CIVILIZED  RACES 

IF  the  facts  and  arguments  set  forth  in  the 
preceding  chapters  are  correct  we  should  not 
expect  to  find  any  living  examples  of  the  un- 
spiritualized  man,  since  the  assumption  is 
that  the  whole  race  received  the  influx  which 
started  them  on  their  course  of  purely  human 
development  within  a  strictly  limited  period, 
perhaps  of  a  very  few  generations,  or  even  one 
generation.  The  ancestral  form — the  sup- 
posed missing  link — would  then  have  become 
extinct. 

If  this  were  not  so  we  should  expect  to 
find  some  isolated  groups  of  speechless  man, 
and  of  this  there  is  no  example;  but,  on  the 
contrary,  the  very  lowest  of  existing  races 
are  found  to  possess  languages  which  are 
often  of  extreme  complexity  in  grammatical 
structure  and  in  no  way  suggestive  of  the 

40 


Savages  Not  Morally  Inferior 

primitive  man-animal  of  which  they  are  sup- 
posed to  be  surviving  relics.  So  long  as  we 
got  our  knowledge  respecting  them  from  the 
low-class  Europeans  who  captured  them  for 
slaves  or  shot  them  down  as  wild  beasts,  we 
could  not  possibly  acquire  any  real  knowledge 
of  them  as  human  beings.  But  now  that  we 
have  more  trustworthy  accounts  of  them  by 
intelligent  travellers  or  missionaries,  we  find 
ample  evidence  that  when  by  kindness  and 
sympathy  we  penetrate  to  their  inner  nature, 
we  discover  that  they  possess  human  quali- 
ties of  the  same  kind  as  our  own.  A  few 
examples  of  what  unprejudiced  witnesses  say 
of  them  will  be  very  instructive. 

Darwin,  after  attending  a  meeting  be- 
tween Captain  Fitzroy  and  the  chief  of  a  small 
island  near  Tahiti  to  settle  a  question  of 
compensation  for  injury  to  an  English  ship, 
says:  "I  cannot  sufficiently  express  our  sur- 
prise at  the  extreme  good  sense,  the  reason- 
ing powers,  moderation,  candor,  and  prompt 
resolution  which  were  displayed  on  all 
sides." 

Captain  Cook  himself,  who  saw  them  in 
their  primitive  condition,  speaks  of  the  na- 

41 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

tives  of  the  Friendly  Isles  as  being  "liberal, 
brave,  open,  and  candid,  without  either  sus- 
picion or  treachery,  cruelty,  or  revenge"; 
and  a  century  later  Admiral  Erskine  remarks 
that  "they  carry  their  habits  of  cleanliness 
and  decency  to  a  higher  point  than  the  most 
civilized  nations";  while  all  the  Polynesian 
races  are  kind  and  attentive  to  the  sick  and 
aged,  and  unlimited  hospitality  is  everywhere 
practised  by  them. 

Even  the  Australian  aborigines,  who  are 
often  said  to  be  one  of  the  lowest  of  human 
races,  are  found  to  possess  many  good  quali- 
ties by  those  who  know  them  best.  Mr. 
Curr,  who  was  for  forty  years  protector  of 
the  aborigines  in  Victoria,  says: 

"Socially,  the  black  is  polite,  gay,  fond  of 
laughter,  and  has  much  bonhomie  in  his  com- 
position. .  .  .  The  natives  are  very  strict  in 
obeying  their  laws  and  customs,  even  under  great 
temptation.  The  horror  of  marrying  a  woman 
within  the  prohibited  degrees  of  relationship,  the 
extreme  grief  they  manifest  at  the  death  of  chil- 
dren or  relatives,  and  sometimes  even  for  white 
men,  as  illustrated  by  the  native  boy  who  was  the 
sole  companion  of  the  unfortunate  Kennedy  when 
he  was  murdered,  are  sufficient  to  indicate  that 

42 


Savages  Not  Morally  Inferior 

they  possess  affections  and  a  sense  of  right  and 
wrong  not  very  different  from  our  own." 

The  fact  that  the  physical  characteristics 
of  the  Australians  are  substantially  those  of 
the  Caucasian  race  in  its  lowest  types  has  led 
me  to  conclude  that  these  interesting  people 
may  have  been  descended  from  much  more 
civilized  remote  ancestors,  and  are  thus  an 
example  of  degradation  rather  than  of  sur- 
vival.* 

Many  other  illustrations  of  both  intelli- 
gence and  morality  are  met  with  among 
savage  races  in  all  parts  of  the  world;  and 
these,  taken  as  a  whole,*  show  a  substantial 
identity  of  human  character,  both  moral  and 
emotional,  with  no  marked  superiority  in  any 
race  or  country.  <  In  intellect,  where  the  great- 
est advance  is  supposed  to  have  occurred, 
this  may  be  wholly  due  to  the  cumulative 
effect  of  successive  acquisitions  of  knowledge 
handed  down  from  age  to  age.  Euclid  and 
Archimedes  were  probably  the  equals  of  any 

*See  my  Australia  and  New  Zealand,  Chap.  V.,  "The  Aus- 
tralian Aborigines,"  where  this  view  was  first  set  forth.  (Stan- 
ford, 1893.)  For  cases  of  morality  among  savages  see  my  Natural 
Selection  and  Tropical  Nature,  pp.  199-201. 

43 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

of  our  greatest  mathematicians  of  today, 
while  the  architecture  of  Greece,  of  India,  and 
of  Central  America  is  little  inferior  to  mediaeval 
Gothic.  But  none  of  these,  though  so  dif- 
ferent in  style,  can  be  said  to  prove  any  real 
advance  in  intellectual  power  from  that  of 
the  builders  of  the  much  more  ancient  temples 
and  pyramids  of  Egypt.  This  latter  coun- 
try, too,  in  its  high  material  civilization  and 
its  remarkable  religious  system,  shows  it- 
self the  equal  of  any  that  has  succeeded  it. 


44 


CHAPTER  VII 

'A  SELECTIVE  AGENCY  NEEDED  TO  IMPROVE 
CHARACTER 

THE  general  result  of  the  facts  and  arguments 
now  set  forth  in  the  merest  outline  leads  us 
to  conclude  that  there  has  been  no  definite 
advance  of  morality  from  age  to  age,  and 
that  even  the  lowest  races,  at  each  period, 
possessed  the  same  intellectual  and  moral 
nature  as  the  higher.  The  manifestations  of 
this  essentially  human  nature  in  habits  and 
conduct  were  often  very  diverse,  in  accord- 
ance with  diversities  of  the  social  and  moral 
environment.  This  is  quite  in  accordance 
with  the  now  well-established  doctrine  that 
the  ^essential  character  of  man,  intellectual, 
emotional,  and  moral,  is  inherent  in  him 
from  birth\  that  it  is  subject  to  great  varia- 
tion fron/  individual  to  individual,  and 
that  its  manifestations  in  conduct  can  be 
modified  in  a  very  high  degree  by  the  influence 
of  public  opinion  and  systematic  teaching, 

45 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

These  latter  changes,  however,  are  not  hered- 
itary, and  it  follows  that  no  definite  advance 
in  morals  can  occur  in  any  race  unless  there  is 
some  selective  or  segregative  agency  at  work. 

As  there  is  a  great  amount  of  misconcep- 
tion on  this  subject  some  explanation  may  be 
advisable.  Many  well-educated  and  intelli- 
gent persons  seem  to  think  that  whatever 
characters  or  faculties  are  hereditary  are  also 
necessarily  cumulative.  They  hear  that  men- 
tal as  well  as  physical  characteristics  are 
hereditary;  their  own  observation  tells  them 
that  there  are  musical  families  as  well  as 
tall  families.  They  hear  that  the  late  Sir 
Francis  Galton  wrote  a  book  on  Hereditary 
Genius  y  and  perhaps  they  have  read  it;  but 
they  do  not  observe  that  neither  he  nor  any 
one  else  has  proved  that  genius  of  any  kind 
is  cumulative,  that  is,  that  a  man  or  woman 
of  genius  will  have,  on  the  average,  some  one 
or  more  children  with  a  greater  amount  of 
that  special  power  or  faculty  than  their  own. 
The  very  contrary  of  this  is  really  the  case. 
/The  more  a  person's  talent  or  mental  power 
( is  above  the  average  the  less  chance  there  is 
\  that  any  of  his  or  her  children  will  have  still 

46 


Selective  Agency  and  Character 

more  of  that  power  than  he  has.)  A  really 
great  poet,  or  painter,  or  musician  appears 
suddenly  in  a  family  of  mediocre  ability  or 
of  no  ability  at  all  in  that  special  direction. 
A  few  examples  may  be  instructive. 

Sir  William  Herschel  was  the  son  of  a 
German  musician  and  was  himself  a  musi- 
cian by  profession;  but  he  became  an  astro- 
nomical genius,  one  of  the  greatest  of  his  age. 
His  son,  Sir  John  Herschel,  was  a  very  clever 
man,  with  advantages  of  education  and 
position.  He  followed  his  father  as  an  astron- 
omer, and  was  a  great  mathematician,  but 
is  never  considered  to  be  equal  to  his  father. 
Darwin's  most  eminent  son  was  a  mathe- 
matician, not  a  naturalist. 

The  reason  of  this  is  that  heredity  follows 
the  law  of  "recession  to  mediocrity."  This 
is,  that  all  groups  of  living  things  vary  around 
an  average  or  mean  as  regards  each  of  their 
characters;  and  those  near  the  average  are 
always  numerous,  while  as  we  approach  the 
extremes  in  either  direction  the  numbers 
become  less  and  less.  Families  follow  the 
same  law.  If  you  take  a  family  for  three  or 
four  generations,  including  perhaps  some 

47 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

hundreds  of  persons,  some  will  be  short,  some 
tall,  but  the  majority  will  be  near  the  mean, 
and  the  tallest  of  all  will  be  less  likely  to  have 
taller  descendants  than  themselves  than  those 
nearer  the  average.  But  the  children  of  the 
tallest,  though  generally  shorter  than  their 
parents,  will  still  tend  to  be  above  the  average 
height. 

When  a  character  is  so  useful  to  its  pos- 
sessor in  the  struggle  for  existence  as  to  be 
of  what  is  termed  "survival  value,"  then 
those  that  vary  most  above  the  average  will 
be  preserved  or  selected  generation  after 
generation  as  long  as  the  increase  is  useful. 

It  is  because  the  higher  intellectual  or 
moral  powers  are  so  rarely  of  life-preserving 
value,  and  are  not  infrequently  the  reverse, 
that  they  are  not  cumulative,  though  they  are 
hereditary. 

With  this  explanation  we  will  now  proceed 
to  examine  somewhat  closely  our  moral  posi- 
tion as  a  nation;  what  is  the  nature  of  our 
social  environment;  how  it  came  to  be  what 
it  is,  and  what  lessons  we  may  learn  from  it. 


48 


CHAPTER  VIII 

ENVIRONMENT  DURING  THE  NINETEENTH 
CENTURY 

DURING  the  eighteenth  century  our  material 
civilization,  which  had  long  been  almost 
stationary,  began  to  advance  with  the  growth 
of  the  physical  sciences,  but  at  first  with 
extreme  slowness.  The  earliest  steps  were 
made  by  the  application  of  machinery  to 
some  of  the  domestic  arts.  Some  refine- 
ments were  made  in  the  manners  and  cus- 
toms of  our  daily  life;  but  there  were  few, 
if  any,  indications  of  permanent  or  wide- 
spread change,  either  for  better  or  worse,  in 
our  intellectual  or  moral  nature. 

The  nineteenth  century,  however,  saw  the 
initiation  of  a  great  change  in  the  economic 
environment  due  to  the  rapid  invention  of 
labor-saving  machinery,  which,  with  the 
equally  rapid  application  of  steam  power, 
led  to  an  increase  of  wealth  production  such 
as  had  never  been  known  on  the  earth  before. 

49 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

During  the  same  period  new  modes  of  loco- 
motion were  brought  into  daily  use,  the 
facilities  for  inter-communication  were  in- 
creased a  hundredfold,  scientific  discoveries 
opened  up  to  us  new  and  unthought-of  mys- 
teries of  the  universe,  and  the  whole  earth 
was  ransacked  for  its  treasures,  both  vege- 
table and  mineral,  to  an  extent  that  surpassed 
all  that  had  been  accomplished  since  the 
dawn  of  civilization. 

But  this  rapid  growth  of  wealth,  and  in- 
crease of  our  power  over  Nature,  put  too 
great  a  strain  upon  our  crude  civilization 
and  our  superficial  Christianity,  and  it  was 
accompanied  by  various  forms  of  social  im- 
morality, almost  as  amazing  and  unprece- 
dented. Some  of  these  may  be  here  briefly 
referred  to. 

Our  vast  textile  factory  system  may  be 
said  to  have  commenced  with  the  nineteenth 
century,  and  the  profits  were  at  first  so  large 
and  so  dependent  on  the  supply  of  labor 
that  the  mill-owners  hired  children  from  the 
workhouses  of  the  great  cities  by  hundreds 
and  even  thousands.  These  children,  from  the 
age  of  five  or  six  upwards,  were  taken  as 

50 


Nineteenth-Century  Environment 

apprentices  for  seven  years,  and  they  really 
became  the  slaves  of  the  manufacturers, 
whose  managers  made  them  work  from  6 
a.m.  to  7  p.m.,  or  sometimes  longer;  and,  in 
order  to  keep  them  awake  in  the  close  atmos- 
phere of  the  factories  it  was  found  necessary 
to  whip  them  at  frequent  intervals.  It  was 
not  till  1819  that  the  age  of  children  em- 
ployed in  factories  was  raised  to  nine  years, 
while  in  1825  the  working  hours  were  limited 
to  seventy- two  a  week! 

From  that  time  onward,  during  the  whole 
of  the  nineteenth  century,  there  was  a  con- 
tinued succession  of  "Factory  Acts,"  each 
aiming  at  abolishing  or  ameliorating  the 
worst  results  of  child  labor — its  inhumanity, 
its  cruelty,  and  its  immorality.  These  legis- 
lative efforts  were  always  opposed  by  the  em- 
ployers, who  usually  succeeded  in  so  mutilat- 
ing them  in  Committee  of  the  House  of 
Commons  as  to  render  them  almost  useless. 
Mrs.  E.  B.  Browning's  noble  verses,  The 
Cry  of  the  Children,  show  that  after  nearly 
fifty  years  of  struggle  the  condition  of  the 
child-workers  was  still,  in  a  high  degree,  cruel, 
degrading,  and  therefore  immoral,  while  that 

51 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

of  the  half-timers  who  succeeded  them  was 
almost  as  injurious. 

As  the  century  wore  on,  other  evils  of  a 
similar  nature  were  gradually  brought  to 
light.  Children  and  women  were  found  to 
be  working  underground  in  coal  mines,  under 
equally  vile  conditions  as  regards  health  and 
morality;  and  an  enormous  loss  of  life  was 
caused  by  inadequate  ventilation,  insecure 
roof-propping,  imperfect  winding  machinery, 
and  other  causes,  all  due  to  want  of  proper 
precautions  by  the  owners  of  the  mines. 
As  a  matter  of  simple  justice,  such  owners 
should  be  held  responsible  to  the  injured  per- 
son not  only  to  the  full  extent  of  his  wages 
and  for  medical  attendance,  but  should  also 
pay  a  liberal  compensation  for  the  pain  suf- 
fered, and  for  the  extra  labor,  expense,  and 
anxiety  to  his  family.  But  all  such  things 
are  ignored  in  the  case  of  poor  workers,  so 
that  even  the  money  compensation  is  reduced 
to  the  smallest  amount  possible. 

It  is  one  of  the  great  defects  of  our  law 
that  deaths  due  to  preventable  causes  in 
any  profit-making  business  are  not  criminal 
offences.  Till  they  are  made  so,  it  will  be 

52 


Nineteenth-Century  Environment 

impossible  to  save  the  hundreds,  or  even  thou- 
sands, of  lives  now  lost  owing  to  neglect  of 
proper  precautions  in  all  kinds  of  dangerous 
or  unhealthy  trades.  However  costly  such 
precautions  may  be,  expense  should  not  be 
considered  when  human  life  is  risked;  and 
the  present  state  of  the  law  is  therefore  im- 
moral. 

Notwithstanding  Acts  of  Parliament  and 
numerous  Inspectors  (whose  salaries  should 
be  paid  by  the  mine  owners),  explosions  and 
other  accidents  underground  continue  to 
increase,  the  year  1910  being  a  record  year, 
with  its  1,775  deaths;  and  even  the  number  in 
proportion  to  the  workers  employed  is  the 
highest  for  the  last  twenty  years. 

Yet  no  one  is  punished,  or  even  held  re- 
sponsible for  these  deaths.  Surely,  this  shows 
a  deplorable  absence  of  moral  feeling,  both 
in  the  general  public  and  in  Parliament.  The 
responsibility  of  Parliament  is  really  criminal, 
since  it  always  allows  its  legislation  to  be  made 
ineffective  by  the  fear  of  diminishing  the 
employers'  profits,  thus  deliberately  placing 
money-making  above  human  life  and  human 
well-being. 

53 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

In  the  case  of  mines  and  quarries,  Parlia- 
ment is  especially  responsible,  because  the 
possession  of  the  mineral  wealth  of  our  coun- 
try by  private  individuals  is  itself  a  gross 
usurpation  of  public  rights,  and  should  have 
been  long  ago  declared  illegal.  Whatever 
arguments — and  they  are  very  strong — show 
us  that  the  land  itself  should  not  be  private 
property,  are  ten  times  stronger  in  the  case 
of  the  minerals  within  its  bowels.  The  value 
of  land  increases  with  its  proper  use,  but  in 
the  case  of  minerals,  the  value  is  absolutely 
destroyed.  Surely,  it  is  a  crime  against 
posterity  to  allow  the  strictly  limited  mineral 
wealth  of  our  country  to  be  made  private 
property,  and  very  largely  sold  to  foreigners, 
solely  to  increase  the  wealth  of  individuals 
and  to  the  absolute  impoverishment  of  our- 
selves and  our  children.* 

I  will  here  add  one  other  argument  which 
goes  to  the  root  of  the  matter  by  showing 
that  the  alleged  owners  of  minerals  have  not 
even  a  legal  title  to  them.  It  is,  I  believe,  a 

*  I  pointed  this  out  forty  years  ago  in  an  article  entitled  Coal 
a  National  Trust,  which  I  republished  twelve  years  ago  in  my 
Studies,  Scientific  and  Social  (Vol.  II.,  Chap.  VIII.). 

54 


Nineteenth-Century  Environment 

maxim  of  law  that  public  rights  cannot  be 
lost  by  disuse.  Landed  estates  were,  in  our 
country,  created  by  the  Norman  Conqueror 
to  be  held  subject  to  the  performance  of 
feudal  duties.  Deep-seated  minerals  were 
then  not  known  to  exist,  and  were  not  (I 
believe)  specifically  included  in  the  original 
grants.  Except,  therefore,  where  they  have 
since  been  made  private  property  by  Act  of 
Parliament,  they  still  remain  public  property. 
I  submit,  therefore,  that  they  may  be  both 
legally  and  equitably  resumed  by  the  Govern- 
ment as  public  property,  and  worked  for 
the  good  of  the  public  and  of  posterity.  Com- 
pensation to  the  supposed  present  owners 
would  be  a  matter  of  favor,  not  of  right. 


55 


CHAPTER  IX 

INSANITARY  DWELLINGS  AND  LIFE- 
DESTROYING  TRADES 

THE  enormous  difference  between  town  and 
country  dwellers  as  regards  duration  of  life 
and  the  prevalence  of  zymotic  diseases  has 
been  known  statistically  since  the  era  of 
registration,  and  a  body  of  Health  Officers 
has  been  set  up  to  report  upon  the  worst 
cases.  The  local  authorities  have  power  to 
compel  the  owners  of  unhealthy  dwellings 
to  put  them  into  a  sanitary  condition,  or  even 
order  them  to  be  entirely  rebuilt.  But  as 
many  of  the  members  of  corporations  and 
other  local  boards  are  often  themselves 
owners  of  such  property,  or  have  intimate 
friends  who  are  so,  very  little  has  been  done 
to  remedy  the  evil.  Again  and  again,  in  all 
parts  of  the  country,  the  Health  Officers  have 
duly  reported,  but  their  reports  have  been 
ignored.  In  some  cases,  where  the  Health 
Officer  has  been  too  persistent,  he  has  been 
asked  to  resign  or  has  been  discharged.  A 
few  general  facts  may  be  here  given. 

56 


Insanitary  Dwellings 

By  the  last  complete  Census  returns  (1901), 
there  are  in  England  and  Wales  7,036,868 
tenements,  and  of  these  3,286,526,  or  nearly 
half,  have  from  one  to  four  rooms  only. 
In  London,  out  of  a  total  of  1,019,646  tene- 
ments, 672,030,  or  considerably  more  than 
half,  have  from  one  to  four  rooms;  while 
there  are  about  150,000  tenements  of  only 
one  room,  in  which  are  living  313,298  persons, 
or  about  two  and  a  quarter  persons  in  each 
room  on  the  average.  There  are,  however, 
about  20,000  persons  living  five  in  a  room, 
and  20,000  more  who  have  six,  seven,  or  eight 
in  a  room.  As  most  of  these  one-roomed 
tenements  are  either  the  cellars  or  attics  of 
houses  in  the  most  crowded  parts  of  large 
towns,  where  there  is  impure  air,  little  light, 
and  scanty  water  supply,  the  condition  of 
those  who  dwell  in  them  may  be  imagined — 
or  rather  cannot  be  imagined,  except  by  those 
who  have  explored  them. 

Equally  inhuman,  immoral,  and  even  crim- 
inal, is  the  neglect  of  all  adequate  measures 
to  check  the  loss  of  infant  life  through  the 
overwork,  poverty,  or  starvation  of  the 
mother,  together  with  overcrowded  and  in- 

57 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

sanitary  dwellings.  In  the  mad  race  for  wealth 
by  capitalists  and  employers  most  of  our 
towns  and  cities  have  been  allowed  to  develop 
into  veritable  death-traps  for  the  poor.  This 
has  been  known  for  the  greater  part  of  a 
century,  yet  nothing  really  effective  has  been 
done,  notwithstanding  abundant  health  legis- 
lation— again  made  useless  by  the  dread  of 
diminishing  the  excessive  profits  of  manu- 
facturers and  slum-owners.  One  of  the  Labor 
newspapers  calls  our  attention  to  the  follow- 
ing facts  for  1911  as  to  Infant  mortality  per 
1,000  born: 

PER  1,000 

Deptford,  East  Ward  (poor)  .  .  197 
Deptford,  West  Ward  (rich)  .  .  68 
Bournville  Garden  Village  ...  65 
St.  Mary's  Ward,  Birmingham  .  331 

Such  facts  exist  all  over  the  kingdom. 
They  have  been  talked  about  and  deplored 
for  the  last  half-century  at  least.  Who  has 
murdered  the  100,000  children  who  die  an- 
nually before  they  are  one  year  old?  Who 
has  robbed  the  millions  that  just  survive  of 
all  that  makes  childhood  happy — pure  food, 
fresh  air,  play,  rest,  sleep,  and  proper  nurture 

' 


Insanitary  Dwellings 

and  teaching?  Again  we  must  answer,  our 
Parliament,  which  occupies  itself  with  any- 
thing rather  than  the  immediate  saving  of 
human  life  and  abolishing  widespread  human 
misery,  the  whole  of  which  is  remediable. 
And  all  for  fear  of  offending  the  rich  and 
powerful  by  some  diminution  of  their  ever- 
increasing  accumulations  of  wealth.  No  think- 
ing man  or  woman  can  believe  that  this  state 
•of  things  is  absolutely  irremediable;  and  the 
persistent  acquiescence  in  it  while  loudly 
boasting  of  our  civilization,  of  our  science,  of 
our  national  prosperity,  and  of  our  Chris- 
tianity, is  the  proof  of  a  hypocritical  lack  of 
national  morality  that  has  never  been  sur- 
passed in  any  former  age. 

A  new  set  of  evils  has  grown  up  in  the 
various  so-called  "unhealthy  trades" — the 
lead  glaze  in  the  china  manufacture,  the  steel 
dust  in  cutlery  work,  and  the  endless  variety 
of  poisonous  liquids  and  vapors  in  the  numer- 
ous chemical  works  or  processes,  by  which  so 
many  fortunes  have  been  made.  These, 
together,  are  the  cause  of  a  large  direct  loss 
of  life,  and  a  much  larger  amount  of  permanent 
injury,  together  with  a  terrible  reduction  in 

59 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

the  duration  of  life  of  all  the  workers  in  such 
trades.  Yet  in  one  case  only — that  of  phos- 
phorus matches  —  has  anyj  such  injurious 
process  of  manufacture  been  put  an  end  to. 
Wealth  has  been  deliberately  preferred  to 
human  life  and  happiness.* 

One  of  the  most  deadly  of  trades  seems  to 
have  remained  unnoticed  till  it  has  been 
brought  to  light  by  the  new  Labor  paper, 
The  Daily  Citizen,  in  a  series  of  articles  by  Mr. 
Keighley  Snowden  entitled  The  Broken  Women. 
Never  was  a  title  better  deserved,  since  large 
numbers  of  girls  and  young  women  are  em- 
ployed at  Lye  and  Cradley  Heath,  in  what  is 
commonly  named  the  "Hollow-ware"  works. 
This  is  the  tinning,  or  galvanizing,  as  it  is 
usually  termed,  of  buckets  and  other  domestic 
utensils,  in  which  lead  is  used;  and  it  pro- 
duces one  of  the  most  virulent  forms  of  lead- 
poisoning.  The  symptoms  are,  among  other 
more  painful  ones,  the  loss  of  hair  and  the 
loosening  and  ultimate  loss  of  teeth,  culminat- 
ing either  in  chronic  illness  or  death,  some- 
times in  a  few  months  or  years.  Five  years 

*  An  account  of  some  deadly  trades  is  given  in  Mr.  R.  H. 
Sherard's  book,  The  White  Slaves  of  England. 

60 


Insanitary  Dwellings 

ago  there  was  a  Home  Office  inquiry,  which, 
after  full  examination,  reported  that  the 
process  used  was  dangerous  to  life,  that  no 
precautions  could  render  it  harmless,  and  that 
it  should  be  totally  discontinued. 

An  order  was  then  issued  by  the  Home 
Office  that  after  a  time-limit  (two  years) 
the  process  should  be  no  longer  used;  but 
that  order  has  not  been  obeyed  (except  by 
a  few  employers)  to  this  day.  The  deadly 
nature  of  this  work  was  accompanied  by 
miserably  low  wages,  as  shown  by  the  fact 
that  the  women  workers  have  at  length 
struck  to  obtain  a  minimum  of  los.  a  week! 
Helped  by  some  humane  friends,  they  have 
at  length  succeeded  in  obtaining  this  miser- 
able wage,  and  for  the  present  are  in  a  state 
of  comparative  happiness!  How  long  it 
will  be  before  the  Government  abolishes  this 
deadly  process  we  cannot  tell.  The  following 
is  a  brief  statement  of  what  these  poor  women 
have  to  suffer,  extracted  from  The  Daily 
Citizen  of  November  20,  1912: 

"They  had,  without  power  to  resist  them,  suf- 
fered repeated  and  ruthless  reductions  of  wages. 
They  had  seen  their  industry  brought  down  by 

61 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

*jti 

reckless  competition,  and  the  manufacture  of 
shoddy  goods,  to  the  point  at  which  men  could 
no  longer  earn  enough  to  support  their  families. 
They  had  seen  their  wives  and  daughters  and 
boys  forced  by  want  at  home  into  workshops, 
where,  as  official  inquiry  has  shown,  health  was 
sucked  out  of  their  bodies  as  though  they  had 
been  the  victims  of  vampires.  They  had  seen 
the  introduction  and  growth  of  the  sub-contract- 
ing 'stint'  system,  under  which  boyhood  and  girl- 
hood and  motherhood  were  driven  as  though  they 
had  been  slaves  under  the  lash,  and  their  earn- 
ings cut  down  to  a  penny  an  hour.  Meanwhile, 
they  lived  in  the  hovels  and  holes  of  a  place  which 
can  only  be  fitly  described  as  one  of  the  dirtiest 
ashpits  of  a  civilization  reckless  of  dirt  where 
profit  is  a  question." 

Those  who  want  to  know  what  horrors 
can  exist  today  in  England  should  read 
Mr.  Snowden's  series  of  articles  on  the  sub- 
ject. They  are  restrained  in  language,  and 
state  the  bare  facts  from  careful  personal 
observation.  That  such  things  should  still 
exist  in  a  country  claiming  to  be  civilized 
would  be  incredible,  were  there  not  so  many 
others  of  a  like  nature  and  almost  as  bad. 

In  an  almost  exhaustive  volume  on  Dis- 
eases of  Occupation  by  Sir  Thomas  Oliver, 

62 


Insanitary  Dwellings 

M.D.  (1908),  there  is  only  a  short  reference 
to  the  hollow-ware  trade  of  the  "black  coun- 
try" near  Birmingham.  But  the  tin-plate 
industry  of  South  Wales  is  more  fully  de- 
scribed, with  the  same  pitiable  condition  of 
the  women  workers  and  the  same  terrible 
results  to  health  and  life.  Yet  nothing  what- 
ever seems  to  be  done  by  the  manufacturers; 
and  though  two  Home  Office  Inspectors  have 
fully  reported  on  its  horrors  from  1888  on- 
wards, no  notice  appears  to  have  been  taken 
of  them,  nor  has  there  been  any  Government 
interference  with  conditions  of  labor  which 
are  a  disgrace  to  civilization. 


CHAPTER  X 

ADULTERATION,  BRIBERY,  AND  GAMBLING 

AFTER  the  terrible  national  crime  of  deadly 
employments  it  is  almost  an  anti-climax  to 
enumerate  the  vast  mass  of  dishonesty  and 
falsehood  that  pervades  our  commercial  sys- 
tem in  every  department.  Almost  every 
fabric,  whether  of  cotton,  linen,  wool,  or  silk, 
is  so  widely  and  ingeniously  adulterated  by 
the  inter-mixture  of  cheaper  materials  that  the 
pure  article  as  supplied  to  our  grandparents 
is  hardly  to  be  obtained.  Of  this  one  example 
only  must  serve.  Calicoes  have  been  suc- 
cessively dressed  with  such  substances  as 
paste  and  tallow;  then  with  the  still  cheaper 
china  clay  and  size;  and  in  some  cases  from 
50  to  90  per  cent,  of  these  latter  materials 
have  been  sold  as  calico  for  exportation  to 
countries  inhabited  by  what  we  term  savages. 
These  people  only  found  out  the  deception 
when  the  need  for  washing  or  exposure  to 
tropical  rains  reduced  the  material  to  a 

64 


Adulteration,  Bribery,  Gambling 

flimsy  and  worthless  rag,  as  I  have  myself 
witnessed  in  some  parts  of  the  Malay  Archi- 
pelago.* 

Even  worse  is  the  adulteration  of  almost 
every  kind  of  prepared  food — including  the 
showy  sweetmeats  which  tempt  our  children 
— with  various  chemicals,  which  are  often 
injurious  to  health,  and  sometimes  fatal;  , 
while  even  the  drugs  we  take  in  the  endeavor 
to  cure  our  various  ailments  are  frequently 
so  treated  as  to  be  useless  or  even  hurtful. 
Along  with  this  form  of  dishonesty  is  what 
may  be  termed  simple  cheating  in  the  de- 
scription of  goods  sold,  especially  as  to 
quantity.  Threads  and  fabrics  are  generally 
shorter  or  narrower  than  stated,  giving  a 
larger  profit  when  sold  in  enormous  quan- 
tities in  our  great  retail  shops. 

Then,  again,  there  is  a  widespread  system 
of  bribery  of  servants  or  other  employees 
in  order  to  obtain  more  customers  or  to  secure 
contracts;  and  though  these  are  all  crim- 

*  These  facts  are  given  in  the  Ninth  Edition  of  the  "Ency- 
clopaedia Britannica."  In  recent  editions  the  article  Adultera- 
tion is  limited  to  food  and  drugs.  In  "  Chambers'  Encyclopaedia," 
cotton,  linen,  and  woollens  are  included  among  adulterated 
fabrics. 

65 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

inal  offences,  and  a  great  host  of  inspectors 
and  official  analysts  are  employed  to  discover 
and  convict  the  offenders,  yet  so  few  people 
are  willing  to  take  the  trouble  and  lose  the 
time  and  money  involved  in  putting  the  law 
into  motion,  that  a  very  large  percentage  of 
these  offences  go  undiscovered  and  unpun- 
ished. 

Yet  another  and  more  serious  form  of 
-tJ  plunder  of  the  public  is  carried  on  by  means 
of  Joint  Stock  Companies,  of  which  there 
are  now  more  than  50,000  in  England  and 
Wales.  In  the  year  1911  the  number  of 
new  companies  was  5,959,  while  4,353  ceased 
to  exist,  giving  an  increase  of  1,606  in  the 
year.  The  Limited  Liability  Act  was  passed 
in  1855,  in  order  that  the  public  might  invest 
their  savings  in  companies,  and  thus  share 
in  the  profits  of  our  industry  and  commerce. 
It  was  supposed  to  be  quite  proper  that 
anyone  should  benefit  by  the  enterprise  and 
industry  of  others;  but  to  do  so  is  essen- 
tially immoral  and  has  ,  resulted  in  a  vast 
system  of  swindling  and  terrible  losses  to  the 
innocent  investors.  The  promoters,  direc- 
tors, secretaries,  and  bankers  of  these  com- 

66 


Adulteration,  Bribery,  Gambling 

panics  always  gain;  those  that  take  up  the 
shares  often  lose;  and  the  amount  of  misery 
and  absolute  ruin  of  those  who  fondly  hoped 
to  add  to  their  scanty  incomes,  and  have  been 
deluded  by  the  names  of  well-known  public 
men  among  the  directors,  is  incalculable. 

Our  Stock  Exchanges,  too,  are  used  largely 
for  pure  gambling,  which,  owing  to  its  vast 
extent  and  being  carried  on  under  business 
forms,  is  perhaps  more  ruinous  than  any 
other.  But  this  form  of  gambling  goes  on 
unchecked,  and  is  generally  accepted  as  quite 
honest  business.  Yet  ordinary  betting  on 
races  and  other  forms  of  direct  gambling 
are  hypocritically  condemned  as  immoral  and 
criminal. 

The  vast  fabric  of  our  foreign  trade  in 
food,  or  the  raw  materials  of  our  manufac- 
tures, is  also  used  to  support  perhaps  the 
greatest  system  of  gambling  the  world  has 
ever  seen.  The  fluctuating  prices  of  corn 
or  cotton,  of  coal  or  mineral  oil,  of  iron  and 
other  metals,  in  the  great  markets  of  the 
world,  are  used  in  two  ways  by  a  large  com- 
munity of  gamblers,  who  not  only  do  not 
require  the  goods  they  buy,  but  who  never 

67 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

see  nor  possess  them.  The  ordinary  specu- 
lator who  buys  when  prices  are  low,  to  sell 
again  at  a  profit,  without  himself  being  able 
to  influence  the  rise  or  fall  of  price,  is  a  pure 
gambler  who  thinks  he  can  foresee  the  changes 
of  the  market  price  in  the  immediate  future. 
But  the  great  capitalists  who,  either  singly 
or  by  means  of  what  are  called  rings  or  com- 
bines, purchase  such  vast  quantities  of  the 
special  product  as  to  create  a  scarcity  in  the 
market,  leading  to  a  large  rise  of  price,  are 
ingenious  robbers  rather  than  gamblers,  be- 
cause, by  clever  dealings  with  such  a  monop- 
oly, often  aided  by  false  rumors  widely 
circulated  in  newspapers  owned  or  bribed 
by  them,  they  are  able  to  make  enormous 
profits  at  the  expense  of  those  who  are  obliged 
to  purchase  for  actual  business  purposes  or 
for  daily  use.  This  is  one  of  the  methods 
by  which  the  great  millionaires  and  multi- 
millionaires of  the  world  accumulate  their 
wealth,  every  penny  of  which  is  at  the  cost 
of  the  consuming  public. 

This  is  certainly  as  immoral  as  any  of  the 
petty  forms  of  swindling  with  marked  cards, 
loaded  dice,  or  the  wilful  losing  of  a  race; 

68 


Adulteration,  Bribery,  Gambling 

yet  the  possessors  of  such  wealth  are  usually 
held  to  be  clever  business  men,  whose  moral- 
ity is  not  questioned. 

All  these  inconsistencies  as  regards  the 
moral  status  of  various  kinds  of  gambling 
or  dishonest  speculation  arise  from  our  invet- 
erate habit  of  dealing  with  limited  cases, 
each  judged  on  its  supposed  merits  as  to 
consequences,  instead  of  looking  to  funda- 
mental principles.  Why  is  gambling  immoral  ? 
Not  because  it  is  a  game  of  chance  entered 
into  for  mere  amusement,  even  when  played 
for  small  money  stakes  which  are  of  no  im- 
portance to  any  of  the  players.  The  funda- 
mental wrong  arises  whenever  it  is  used  for 
obtaining  wealth  or  any  part  of  the  player's 
income;  and  the  reason  is,  that  whatever 
one  wins,  some  one  else  loses;  while  its  evil 
nature,  socially,  depends  upon  the  fact  that 
whoever  acquires  wealth  by  such  means  con- 
tributes nothing  useful  to  the  social  organism 
of  which  he  forms  a  part.  If  it  were  taught 
to  every  child,  and  in  every  school  and 
college,  that  it  is  morally  wrong  for  any  one 
to  live  upon  the  combined  labor  of  his  fellow- 
men  without  contributing  an  approximately 

69 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

equal  amount  of  useful  labor,  whether  phys- 
ical or  mental,  in  return,  all  kinds  of  gambling, 
as  well  as  many  other  kinds  of  useless  occupa- 
tion, would  be  seen  to  be  of  the  same  nature 
as  direct  dishonesty  or  fraud,  and,  therefore, 
would  soon  come  to  be  considered  disgrace- 
ful as  well  as  immoral. 

We  see,  then,  that  the  whole  commercial 
fabric  of  our  country — our  immense  mills 
and  factories,  our  vast  exports  and  imports, 
our  home  trade,  wholesale  and  retail,  and 
innumerable  transactions  in  our  stock  ex- 
changes— is  permeated  with  various  forms  of 
dishonesty,  gambling,  and  direct  robbery  of 
individuals  or  of  the  public.  No  class  is 
wholly  free  from  it,  and  it  increases  in  vol- 
ume from  decade  to  decade,  just  as  our 
boasted  commerce  and  accumulated  wealth 
increases. 

I  have  here  called  attention  to  these  various 
forms  of  immoral  practices  because  they  are 
so  often  ignored.  Yet  they  are  all  officially 
admitted  by  the  enormous  mass  of  the  va- 
rious Royal  Commissions,  Parliamentary  and 
other  reports,  as  well  as  by  the  hundreds  of 
"Acts"  by  which  successive  Parliaments  have 

70 


Adulteration,  Bribery,  Gambling 

endeavored  to  deal  with  them,  but  which 
have,  one  and  all,  proved  to  be  either  wholly 
or  partially  ineffective.  The  reason  of  this 
failure  is  that  in  every  case  symptoms  and 
isolated  results  only  have  been  considered, 
while  the  underlying  causes  of  the  whole 
vast  mass  of  social  corruption  have  never 
been  sought  for,  or,  if  known,  have  never 
influenced  legislation. 


CHAPTER  XI 

OUR  ADMINISTRATION  OF  "JUSTICE"  IS 
IMMORAL 

WHEN  we  read  about  the  Turkish  or  other 
Eastern  law  courts,  in  which  direct  bribery 
of  every  official  up  to  the  judge  himself  is  a 
regular  feature,  we  are  horrified,  and  are  apt 
to  proclaim  the  fact  that  our  judges  never 
take  bribes.  But,  practically,  it  comes  to 
very  nearly  the  same  thing  in  England.  No 
single  step  can  be  made  for  the  purpose  of 
getting  justice  without  paying  fees;  while 
the  whole  process  of  bringing  or  defending 
an  action-at-law  is  so  absurdly  complex  as  to 
be  almost  incredible.  Jeremy  Bentham  sati- 
rized this  by  supposing  a  father  of  a  large 
family  to  adopt  the  same  method  of  settling 
a  dispute  between  two  of  his  sons.  He  would 
not  hear  either  of  them  himself,  but  each 
must  tell  his  story  to  a  stranger  (a  solicitor), 
who  wrote  it  down  and  then  instructed 
another  stranger  (a  barrister)  to  explain  it 

72 


Our  "Justice"  is  Immoral 

to  the  father  (as  judge)  and  twelve  neighbors 
(the  jury).  Then  the  stranger  (barrister)  on 
each  side  asked  questions  of  all  the  family 
who  knew  anything  about  it;  and  the  barris- 
ters, who  had  only  third-hand  knowledge  of 
the  facts,  tried  to  make  each  witness  contra- 
dict himself,  or  to  acknowledge  having  done 
something  as  bad  another  time;  till  the  jury 
became  quite  puzzled,  and  often  decided  as 
the  cleverest  of  the  barristers  told  them. 

That  is  really  the  system  of  l^LW^jcourts^ 
to  this  day;  and  it  is  grossly  \mfair,  because 
the  party  who  can  pay  the  highest  fees  for 
the  services  of  the  most  experienced  counsel 
is  most  likely,  through  the  lawyer's  skill  and 
eloquence,  to  secure  a  ^verdict  in  his  favor. 
Yet  there  is  no  effective  protest  against  this 
unjust  and  absurd  system,  which  absolutely 
denies  all  redress  of  wrongs  to  the  poor  man 
when  oppressed  by  a  rich  one.  One  would 
think  it  self-evident  that  justice  ceases  to 
be  justice  when  it  has  to  be  paid  for.  But 
the  system  is  so  time-hallowed,  the  profession 
of  a  barrister  so  honored,  and  its  rewards  so 
great,  that  it  will  never  be  abolished  till  there 
comes  about  in  our  social  system  that  funda- 

73 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

mental  change  which  will  cut  at  the  very 
root-cause  of  almost  all  our  existing  law- 
suits, immorality,  and  crime. 

In  our  criminal  as  well  as  our  civil  law  and 
procedure  there  is  equal  injustice.  When 
the  poor  man  is  accused  of  the  slightest  offence 
and  brought  before  a  magistrate  by  the  police 
he  is,  even  though  perfectly  honest  and  re- 
spectable, treated  from  the  very  first  as  if  he 
were  guilty,  often  refused  communication 
with  his  friends;  and,  when  the  accusation  is 
serious,  he  is  remanded  to  prison  again  and 
again  till  evidence  has  been  hunted  up,  or 
even  manufactured,  against  him.  Expe- 
rience shows  that  the  latter  is  often  done  and  a 
quite  innocent  man  not  infrequently  punished. 
The  dictum  of  the  law,  that  an  Englishman 
should  be  held  to  be  innocent  till  he  is  proved 
to  be  guilty,  is  absolutely  reversed,  and  he  is 
treated  as  if  he  were  guilty  till,  against  over- 
whelming odds,  he  is  able  to  prove  himself 
innocent.  There  is  no  possible  excuse  for 
this  now,  and  at  the  very  least  every  man  who 
has  a  home  or  a  permanent  employment 
should  be  at  once  discharged  on  his  own 
recognizances. 

74 


Our  "  Justice  "  is  Immoral 

Equally  unjust  and  barbarous  is  the  system 
of  money-fines,  often  for  merely  nominal 
offences,  with  the  alternative  of  imprison- 
ment. To  the  well-off,  or  to  the  habitual 
criminal,  the  fine  is  a  trifle;  but  to  the  poor 
man  charged  with  being  drunk,  with  begging, 
or  with  sleeping  under  a  haystack,  or  any 
such  act  which  is  no  real  offence,  the  common 
punishment  of  los.  or  a  week's  imprisonment, 
leaving  perhaps  wife  and  children  to  starve 
or  be  sent  to  the  workhouse,  is  really  far 
more  immoral  than  the  alleged  offence. 

Again,  our  Poor  Law  itself,  as  usually  ad- 
ministered, is  utterly  immoral.  This  is  what 
a  competent  authority — Mr.  Sidney  Webb — 
says  of  it: 

"Underneath  the  feet  of  the  whole  wage- 
earning  class  is  the  abyss  of  the  Poor  Law.  I  see 
before  me  a  respectable  family  applying  for  relief. 
What  do  we  do  to  them  ?  We,  the  Government  of 
England,  break  up  the  family.  We  strip  each 
individual  of  what  makes  life  worth  living.  When 
the  man  enters  the  workhouse  he  is  stripped  of 
his  citizenship — branded  as  too  infamous  to  vote 
for  a  member  of  Parliament.  Once  in  the  work- 
house, we  put  him  to  toil  or  to  loiter  under  con- 
ditions that  are  so  demoralizing  that  we  turn 

75 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

him  into  a  wastrel.  And  we  strip  the  wife  of  her 
children.  We  send  her  to  the  wash-tub  or  the 
sewing-room,  where  she  associates  with  prosti- 
tutes and  imbeciles.  The  little  children,  if  they 
are  under  five,  are  taken  to  the  workhouse  nur- 
sery, where  they  also  are  tended  by  prostitutes 
and  imbeciles.  There  they  remain,  day  after 
day,  without  ever  going  down  the  workhouse  steps 
until  they  are  old  enough  to  go  to  the  Poor  Law 
school,  or  until  they  are  taken  down  in  their 
coffins,  owing  to  the  terrible  mortality  among  the 
workhouse  babies." 

Of  course,  all  workhouses  are  not  so  bad  as 
this,  but  many  are,  and  have  been  during  the, 
three-quarters  of  a  century  of  their  existence. 
Can  we,  therefore,  wonder  that  week  by  week 
some  poor  and  honest  parents  commit  suicide 
rather  than  see  their  children  starve,  or  be 
separated  from  them  in  the  workhouse!  The 
people  we  thus  drive  to  death  are  many  of 
them  as  good  as  we  ourselves  are;  yet  the 
"Guardians  of  the  Poor" — well-to-do  gentle- 
men and  ladies — go  on  administering  it  week 
after  week  and  year  after  year  without  pro- 
test or  apparent  compunction.  Such  is  the 
deadening  effect  of  long-continued  custom. 


CHAPTER  XII 

INDICATIONS    OF    INCREASING    MORAL    DEGRA- 
DATION 

THERE  are  in  the  Reports  of  the  Registrar- 
General  a  few  statistics  of  special  impor- 
tance because  they  clearly  point  to  certain 
kinds  of  moral  degradation  which  have  been 
increasing  for  the  last  half-century,  thus 
coinciding  with  our  exceptionally  rapid  in- 
crease in  wealth ;  and  also,  as  I  have  shown  in 
preceding  chapters,  with  various  forms  of 
national,  economic,  and  social  deterioration. 
The  first  of  these  is  the  continuous  in- 
crease in  deaths  from  alcoholism,  in  propor- 
tion to  population,  since  the  year  1861. 
Most  persons  will  be  amazed  to  find  that  this 
is  the  case,  because  the  drinking  habit  has 
certainly  diminished;  but  when  the  habit 
becomes  so  powerful  and  lasts  so  long  as  to 
be  the  direct  cause  of  death,  we  are  able  to 
see  the  dimensions  of  the  most  exaggerated 
form  of  the  drink  evil.  The  following  figures 

77 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

are  taken  from  the  successive  Reports  re- 
ferred to: — 

Deaths  from 

/  Average  Alcoholism  per 

of  Years  Million  living 

l86l-l86S   .   .   ...   .   .   41.6 

1866-1870  .......  35.4 

.  1871-1875 .  37.6 

1876-1880 42.4 

1881-1885 48.2 

1886-1890 56.0 

1891-1895 67.8 

1896-1900 85.8 

1901-1905 78.4 

1906-1910 54.6 

There  are  some  irregularities,  the  ratio 
being  nearly  equal  for  the  first  twenty  years, 
after  which  there  is  such  a  continuous  large 
increase  that  from  1876-80  to  1896-1900  the 
mortality  is  doubled,  but  for  the  last  ten  years 
there  has  been  a  decrease,  which  in  the  last 
five  years  is  very  marked. 

But  a  still  worse  and  more  disquieting  fea- 
ture is  the  recent  large  increase  of  mortality 
from  alcoholism  in  women.  Figures  for  the 
separate  sexes  were  not  given  till  1876,  and 

78. 


Increasing  Moral  Degradation 

the  following  table  shows  the  comparison  up 
to  1910: — 

Deaths  from 

Average  Alcoholism 

of  Years  per  Million 

Men  Women 

1876-1880 60.1  24.0 

1881-1885 66.6  31.0 

1886-1890 73.6  39.2 

1891-1895 86.6  50.2 

1896-1900 106.2  66.6 

1901-1905 95.0  63.0 

1906-1910 66.6  43.6 

These  figures,  however  deplorable  and 
startling  in  themselves,  are  as  nothing  in 
comparison  with  what  they  imply.  Death 
from  drink,  more  than  in  the  case  of  any 
other  disease,  is  the  ultimate  and  rarely  at- 
tained result  of  the  vice  of  habitual  intoxica- 
tion. Men  and  women  may  greatly  injure 
their  health,  ruin  their  families,  and  be  dis- 
graceful drunkards,  and  yet  not  die  of  it,  or 
make  any  near  approach  to  doing  so.  What 
is  the  proportion  of  those  who  are  morally  and 
physically  injured  by  drink  to  those  who  kill 
themselves  by  it,  is,  I  suppose,  unknown,  but 
I  imagine  that  one  in  a  thousand  is,  probably, 

79 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

too  high  an  estimate,  and  that  one  death 
among  ten  thousand  moderate  drinkers  who 
also  occasionally  or  frequently  become  in- 
toxicated, would  be  nearer  the  mark.  This 
would  imply  an  increase  in  the  consumption 
of  alcoholic  drinks,  instead  of  which  there  has 
been  an  actual  diminution.  The  fact  prob- 
ably is  that  a  very  large  number  of  moderate 
drinkers  have  ceased  to  consume  alcohol  in 
any  form,  and  this  would  account  for  a  much 
larger  reduction  in  the  total  than  has  actually 
occurred. 

On  the  other  hand,  owing  to  the  increase  of 
those  who  are  only  casually  employed  in  our 
great  cities,  and  whose  one  luxury  is  the  excite- 
ment of  drink,  a  larger  quantity  of  cheap  and 
injuriously  adulterated  spirits  and  other  liquors 
is  consumed,  which,  combined  with  a  defi- 
ciency of  wholesome  food,  leads  more  fre- 
quently to  a  fatal  result. 

Increase  of  Suicide 

The  increase  has  been  long  known  and 
generally  admitted.  It  is  supposed  to  be 
largely  due  to  the  ever-increasing  struggle  for 

subsistence  in  our  great  cities,  the  consequent 

so 


Increasing  Moral  Degradation 

increase  of  unemployment,  and  the  dread  of 
the  workhouse  as  the  only  alternative  to 
starvation.  The  following  are  the  figures  for 
the  last  forty-five  years  for  which  official  data 
have  been  published: — 

Deaths  by 

Average  Suicide  per 

of  Years  Million  living 

1866-1870 66.4 

1871-1875 66.0 

1876-1880 73.6 

1881-1885 73.8 

1886-1890 79.4 

1891-1895 88.6 

1896-1900 89.2 

1901-1905 100.6 

1906-19^ 102.2 

Such  a  table  as  this,  occurring  in  a  country 
which  boasts  of  its  enormous  wealth,  of  its 
ever-increasing  commercial  prosperity,  of  its 
marvellous  advance  in  science  and  the  arts, 
and  command  of  natural  forces,  should,  surely, 
give  us  pause  and  force  upon  us  the  convic- 
tion that  there  is  something  radically  wrong 
in  a  social  system  which  brings  about  such 
terrible  evils. 

8l 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

And  this  should  be  the  more  certainly  seen 
to  be  the  case  because  the  same  increase  is 
taking  place  in  all  those  countries  which  ap- 
proach us  in  their  wealth  and  their  commercial 
prosperity. 

There  is  a  group  of  diseases  which  are  fatal 
to  infants  soon  after  birth.  They  have  been 
steadily  increasing  during  the  last  half-cen- 
tury, and  call  for  special  notice  here,  as  they 
seem  to  indicate  physical  degeneration  as 
well  as  personal  immorality  of  a  dangerous 
and  perhaps  even  a  criminal  nature. 

Proportion  of  Deaths 

Five-year  to  1,000  Births 

Average  Premature      Congenital 

Births  Defects 

l86l-l865 11.19  1.76 

1866-1870 II.SO  1.84 

1871-1875 12.60  1.85 

1876-1880 13.38  2.39 

1881-1885 14.18  3.23 

1886-1890 16.1  4.2 

1891-1895 18.4  4.7 

1896-1900 19.6  4.9 

1901-1905 2O.2      5.9 

1906-1909 20.0    6.6 

82 


Increasing  Moral  Degradation 

The  large  increase  during  the  last  forty- 
five  years  of  very  early  infantile  deaths,  in- 
volving abnormalities  of  mother  or  child, 
seems  very  significant.  The  first  may  be 
connected  with  the  increasing  dislike  of  child- 
bearing,  and  unsuccessful  attempts  to  avoid 
it.  The  second  indicates  some  injurious  con- 
dition of  life  of  the  mother,  such  as  working  at 
unhealthy  or  even  deadly  trades,  which  has 
certainly  been  largely  increasing  during  the 
same  period.  Such  work  for  young  married 
women  should  be  impossible  in  a  civilized 
community. 

On  the  vast  subject  of  prostitution,  of 
which  the  present  movement  for  the  sup- 
pression of  what  is  called  "The  White  Slave 
Traffic"  is  but  one  of  the  aspects,  I  do  not 
propose  to  dwell,  because  I  can  find  no  sta- 
tistics to  show  whether  it  has  increased  or 
decreased  during  the  last  century.  But  as 
the  conditions  have  all  been  favorable  for  it, 
I  have  little  doubt  that  it  has  increased  in 
proportion  to  population.  Such  conditions 
are,  the  enormous  growth  of  great  cities;  an 
increasing  number  of  unmarried  and  wealthy 

83. 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

young  men;  with  an  enormous  number  of 
girls  and  young  women  whose  wages  are 
insufficient  to  provide  them  with  the  rational 
enjoyments  of  life/ 

The  proceedings  of  the  divorce  courts  show 
other  aspects  of  the  result  of  wealth  and 
leisure;  while  a  friend  who  had  been  a  good 
deal  in  London  society  assured  me  that  both 
in  country  houses  and  in  London  various 
kinds  of  orgies  were  occasionally  to  be  met 
with  which  could  hardly  have  been  sur- 
passed in  the  Rome  of  the  most  dissolute 
emperors. 

Of  war,  too,  I  need  say  nothing.  It  has 
always  been  more  or  less  chronic  since  the 
rise  of  the  Roman  Empire,  but  there  is  now 
undoubtedly  a  disinclination  for  war  among 
all  civilized  peoples.  Yet  the  vast  burden  of 
armaments,  taken  together  with  the  most 
pious  declarations  in  favor  of  peace,  must 
be  held  to  show  an  almost  total  absence  of 
morality  as  a  guiding  principle  among  the 
governing  classes.  In  this  respect,  the  in- 
creasing power  of  labor-parties  all  over  the 
world  seems  to  afford  the  only  hope  of  a  real 
moral  advance. 

84 


PART  IL-THEORETICAL 

CHAPTER  XIII 

NATURAL  SELECTION  AMONG  ANIMALS 

WHILE  writing  the  present  volume  I  was 
led  to  refer  to  it  during  some  of  the  numerous 
interviews  on  the  occasion  of  my  recent 
birthday.  This  led  to  some  misrepresenta- 
tion of  my  views,  and  showed  me  how  few 
popular  press-writers  have  any  real  knowl- 
edge of  the  nature  and  extent  of  "natural 
selection,"  more  especially  as  it  affects  the 
human  race.  There  is  also  the  same  igno- 
rance as  regards  "heredity";  and  this  latter 
has  become  almost  a  word  to  conjure  with, 
and  is  thought  by  most  writers  to  explain 
many  things  to  which  it  is  quite  inapplic- 
able, and  as  the  present  work  is  a  very  con- 
densed argument  founded  to  a  considerable 
extent  upon  these  great  natural  laws,  I 
propose  devoting  two  chapters  to  explaining 
and  demonstrating  the  effect  of  natural  selec- 
85 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

tion  in  the  case  of  the  lower  animals  and  of 
man  respectively. 

That  such  an  explanation  is  necessary  may 
be  seen  from  the  following  extract  from  one 
of  our  most  influential  and  well-written  daily 
papers,  the  Pall  Mall  Gazette.  After  referring 
to  the  view  of  the  utter  rottenness  of  our 
present  civilization,  it  quotes  me  as  saying: 
"And  the  average  of  mankind  will  remain  the 
same  until  natural  selection  steps  in  to 
save  it."  (What  I  actually  said  to  the  inter- 
viewer was  "until  some  form  of  selection 
improves  it.")  The  writer  then  goes  on: 

"These  words  must  have  struck  the  inter- 
viewer like  the  crack  of  doom.  For,  stated 
popularly,  the  theory  of  natural  selection  is  the 
doctrine  of  'Devil  take  the  hindmost/  If  nat- 
ural selection  had  fair  play  there  would  be  no 
Children's  Care  Committees;  there  would  be  no 
Poor  Law,  no  Hospitals;  there  would  be  no  Old 
Age  Pensions.  All  the  humanitarian  effort  to 
care  for  the  weak  and  to  help  them  along  the 
path  of  life,  every  effort  to  bind  up  the  broken- 
hearted, every  combination  of  labor  to  secure 
equality  among  the  members  of  a  trade,  stand 
condemned  as  futile  or  worse  by  the  doctrine 
which  Dr.  Russel  Wallace  thinks  can  alone  raise 

86 


Selection  in  the  Animal  World 

the  average  of  man.  His  own  remedies  for  the 
ills  of  society—the  levelling  up  which  he  believes 
to  be  impossible  without  levelling  down,  the 
disinheriting  of  the  unborn  heir,  the  'striking* 
which  he  applauds,  the  universal  education  which 
he  favors— all  these  are  directly  antagonistic 
to  the  workings  of  natural  selection." 

Now,  as  I  am  credited  by  all  my  scientific 
friends  with  having  discovered  the  theory 
of  natural  selection  more  than  fifty  years 
ago,  and  as  the  whole  reading  public  have 
had  this  hammered  into  them  with  needless 
repetition  during  the  whole  of  that  period, 
it  is  rather  amusing  to  be  told  now  that  I 
do  not  know  what  natural  selection  is,  nor 
what  it  implies.  It  is  also  a  striking  proof 
that  the  whole  subject  is  now  held  to  be 
so  old  and  commonplace  as  not  to  be  worth 
studying  by  a  popular  teacher  before  writing 
about  it  so  strongly  and  dogmatically.  If 
he  had  done  so  he  would  not  deliberately 
assert  that  I  hold  opinions  in  regard  to  the 
matter  which  in  several  of  my  books  I  have 
shown  the  fallacy  of. 

I  propose,  therefore,  to  give  here  a  short 
account  of  the  essential  features  of  the  theory 

87 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

of  natural  selection;  how  it  has  operated  in 
bringing  about  the  evolution  of  the  almost 
infinitely  varied  forms  of  plants  and  of  the 
lower  animals;  and  also  to  explain  as  clearly 
as  I  can  why,  and  to  what  extent,  it  has  acted 
differently  in  the  case  of  man. 

Lamarckism  and  Darwinism — How  they 
Differ 

The  first  great  naturalist  who  put  forward 
a  detailed  explanation  of  how  he  supposed 
the  varied  forms  of  animal  life  to  have  been 
produced  was  Lamarck,  a  contemporary  of 
Buffon  and  Goethe,  both  of  whom  believed 
in  evolution,  but  offered  no  explanation  of 
how  it  could  have  been  brought  about. 
Lamarck,  however,  suggested  that  the  various 
organs  of  animals  were  modified  by  voluntary 
effort  producing  increased  development,  as 
when  an  antelope  escapes  from  a  lion  by  its 
swiftness,  which  swiftness  is  increased  by  the 
straining  of  its  limbs  in  flight;  while  the  long 
neck  and  fore-limbs  of  the  giraffe  were  ex- 
plained by  the  continual  stretching  of  these 
parts  of  the  body  to  obtain  foliage  for  food 
during  severe  droughts.  In  addition  to  this 

88 


Selection  in  the  Animal  World 

other  causes  are  at  work,  as  described  in  the 
following  passage,  translated  or  paraphrased 
by  Sir  Charles  Lyell  in  his  Principles  of 
Geology: 

"Every  considerable  alteration  in  the  local 
conditions  under  which  each  race  of  animals 
exists  causes  a  change  in  their  wants,  and  these 
new  wants  excite  them  to  new  actions  and  habits. 
These  actions  require  the  more  frequent  employ- 
ment of  some  parts  before  but  slightly  exercised, 
and  then  greater  development  follows  as  a  con- 
sequence of  their  more  frequent  use.  Other  or- 
gans, no  longer  in  use,  are  impoverished  and 
diminished  in  size;  nay,  are  sometimes  entirely 
annihilated,  while  in  their  place  new  parts  are 
insensibly  produced  for  the  discharge  of  new 
functions." 

Again,  he  says: 

"Thus  otters,  beavers,  water-fowl,  turtles,  and 
frogs  were  not  made  web-footed  in  order  that  they 
might  swim;  but  their  wants  having  attracted 
them  to  the  water  in  search  of  prey,  they  stretched 
out  the  toes  of  their  feet  to  strike  the  water  and 
move  rapidly  along  its  surface.  By  the  repeated 
stretching  of  their  toes  the  skin  which  united 
them  at  the  base  acquired  a  habit  of  extension, 
until,  in  the  course  of  time,  the  broad  membranes 
which  now  connect  their  extremities  were  formed." 

89 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

In  the  case  of  plants,  where  no  voluntary 
movements  occur,  the  cause  of  modification 
was  said  to  be  due  almost  exclusively  to  the 
change  of  local  conditions,  as  the  various 
kinds  of  plants  became  dispersed  over  the 
earth's  surface.  The  influence  of  soil,  of 
temperature,  of  light  and  shade,  are  supposed 
to  produce  definite  changes  which  are  grad- 
ually increased;  just  as  plants  long  culti- 
vated in  our  gardens  have  become  so  changed 
that  the  wild  progenitors  cannot  now  be 
recognized. 

Sir  Charles  Lyell,  who  made  a  careful  study 
of  Lamarck's  great  work,  notes  especially  that 
the  whole  of  the  argument  is  vague  and 
general,  and  that  no  cases  are  given  in  which 
is  shown  how  the  alleged  causes  can  be  sup- 
posed to  have  acted  so  as  to  bring  about  the 
innumerable  changes  that  must  have  occurred. 
What  is  more  important,  however,  is  the 
failure  to  explain  how  the  numerous  minute 
adaptations  of  each  species  to  its  environ- 
ment could  have  arisen  by  the  direct  action 
of  that  environment — in  plants,  the  infinitely 
varied  forms  of  leaves,  flowers,  and  fruits; 
in  animals,  the  forms  and  sizes  of  the  teeth  of 

90 


Selection  in  the  Animal  World 

mammalia  and  of  the  beaks,  wings,  and  feet 
of  birds  to  the  food  they  obtain;  while  the 
enormous  range  of  color  and  marking  in  most 
groups  of  animals  are  such  as  no  amount  of 
desire  or  exertion  on  the  one  hand,  or  direct 
action  of  external  causes  on  the  other,  could 
possibly  have  brought  about.  It  is  not, 
therefore,  surprising  that,  although  a  vast 
amount  of  evidence  was  adduced  to  show  that 
changes  had  taken  place  leading  to  the  evolu- 
tion of  species  from  pre-existing  species, 
yet  causes  adequate  to  bring  about  the 
changes,  and  especially  those  necessary  to 
produce  the  marvellous  adaptations  continu- 
ally being  discovered,  had  not  been  shown  to 
exist. 

It  is  necessary  to  point  this  out,  because  the 
difference  between  the  almost  universal  re- 
jection of  Lamarck's  attempted  solution  of  the 
problem  of  evolution,  and  the  almost  imme- 
diate and  universal  acceptance  of  that  ad- 
duced by  Darwin,  is  otherwise  unexplained. 
The  belief  in  the  doctrine  of  evolution  as  the 
only  rational  explanation  of  the  gradual  de- 
'velopment  of  the  innumerable  forms  of  living 
things  became  more  and  more  general.  The 

91 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

great  body  of  arguments  in  its  favor  were  ad- 
mirably set  forth  by  Robert  Chambers  in  his 
Vestiges  of  Creation,  published  anonymously 
in  1844;  while  Herbert  Spencer's  masterly 
exposition  of  the  argument  for  universal 
evolution  convinced  a  large  number  of  nat- 
uralists and  men  of  science.  But  still  the 
nature  of  the  laws  and  forces  by  which  the 
evolution  of  the  organic  world,  in  all  its 
variety  and  beauty,  could  have  been  brought 
about  remained  not  only  unknown  but  un- 
imagined,  so  that  even  so  great  a  thinker  as 
Sir  John  Herschel  termed  it  "the  mystery  of 
mysteries."  I  will  now  state  as  briefly  as 
possible  the  essential  features  of  Darwin's 
solution  of  the  mystery  in  his  epoch-making 
work,  The  Origin  of  Species. 

Natural  Selection  as  the  Essential  Factor  in 
the  Origin  of  Species 

There  are  two  great,  universal,  and  very 
conspicuous  characteristics  of  the  whole  or- 
ganic world  which,  because  they  are  so  very 
common,  were  almost  ignored  before  Darwin 
showed  their  importance.  These  are  (i) 
the  great  variability  in  all  common  and 


Selection  in  the  Animal  World 

widespread  species,  and  (2)  their  enormous 
powers  of  increase. 

The  facts  of  variability  are  recorded  in  every 
book  on  Darwinism  or  on  organic  evolution, 
and  it  is  only  necessary  here  to  appeal  to  the 
reader's  own  observation  or  to  state  a  few 
illustrative  facts.  Everybody  sees  that  among 
a  hundred  or  a  thousand  people  he  knows  or 
frequently  meets  no  two  are  alike.  This  is 
variability.  He  also  knows  that  the  amount 
of  the  differences  between  them  is  often  very 
large,  and  always,  if  you  have  any  two  of 
them  side  by  side,  easily  perceptible  and 
capable  of  being  described.  He  also  knows 
that  they  differ  in  every  part  arid  organ  that 
can  be  seen:  the  height,  the  bulk  of  body 
the  shape  of  the  hands,  feet,  head,  ears, 
nose,  and  mouth;  the  proportions  of  the  legs, 
arms,  and  body  to  each  other;  the  abun- 
dance and  character  of  the  hair — coarse  or 
fine,  straight  or  curly,  and  of  all  colors  between 
flaxen  and  intense  black.  To  declare  that 
variability  among  men  and  women,  even  of 
the  same  race  and  in  the  same  country,  is  a 
rare  phenomenon,  and  that  in  amount  it  is 
infinitesimal,  would  be  a  ludicrous  mis- 

93 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

statement  of  the  facts  or  a  wilful  perversion  of 
the  truth.  But,  as  regards  animals  or  plants 
in  a  state  of  nature,  this  misstatement  has 
been  made  and  has  been  used  as  an  argument 
against  the  Darwinian  theory.  It  is,  however, 
now  well  known,  as  a  matter  of  direct  observa- 
tion and  measurement,  that  when  a  few  scores 
or  hundreds  of  individuals  are  compared,  even 
in  the  same  district  and  at  the  same  season, 
they  differ  in  their  proportions  to  about 
the  same  amount,  and  to  some  extent  in 
every  visible  part  or  organ,  as  do  human 
beings. 

This,  however,  was  not  well  known  when 
Darwin  collected  the  materials  for  his  various 
works,  and  he  even  sometimes  makes  the  pro- 
viso, "if  they  vary,  for  without  variation 
selection  can  do  nothing";  and  this  has  been 
taken  as  an  admission  that  variation  is  a  rare 
instead  of  being  a  universal  phenomenon. 
He  also  often  spoke  of  the  accumulation  of 
small  or  minute  variations,  and  this  has  led 
to  the  statement  that  variations  are  in- 
finitesimal in  amount,  and  therefore  could, 
at  first,  be  of  no  use  to  the  possessor  in  the 
struggle  for  existence. 

94 


Selection  in  the  Animal  World 

Rapid  Increase  of  All  Organisms 
This  is  another  fact  of  Nature  which  re- 
quires to  be  kept  in  mind  in  all  discussions  of 
the  action  of  natural  selection,  yet  it  is  often 
altogether  ignored  by  critics  of  the  theory. 
As  an  illustrative  fact,  a  not  uncommon 
European  weed  of  the  Cruciferae  family  has 
been  found  to  produce  about  700,000  seeds  on 
a  single  plant,  whence  it  can  be  calculated  that 
if  every  seed  had  room  to  grow  for  three  suc- 
cessive years  their  produce  would  cover  a 
space  of  about  2,000  times  as  large  as  the 
whole  land  surface  of  the  globe.  Some  of 
the  minute  aquatic  forms  of  life  which  increase 
by  division  in  a  few  hours  would,  if  they  all 
had  the  means  of  living,  in  the  same  period 
occupy  a  space  equal  to  that  of  the  entire 
solar  system.  Even  the  largest  and  slowest 
breeding  of  all  known  mammals,  i.e.,  the 
elephant,  would,  if  allowed  space  to  live  and 
breed  freely  for  750  years,  result  in  no  less  than 
nineteen  million  animals. 

By  far  the  larger  part  of  the  criticisms 
of  Darwinism  by  popular  writers  are  due  to 
their  continually  forgetting  these  two  great 
natural  facts:  enormous  variability  about  a 

95 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

mean  value  of  every  part  and  organ,  and 
such  ever-present  powers  of  multiplication 
that,  even  in  the  case  of  vertebrate  animals, 
of  those  born  every  year  only  a  small  pro- 
portion— one-tenth  to  one-hundredth  or  there- 
abouts— live  over  the  second  year.  If  they 
all  lived  their  numbers  would  go  on  con- 
tinually increasing,  which  we  know  is  not 
the  case.  Hence  arises  what  has  been  termed 
"the  struggle  for  existence,"  resulting  in 
"the  survival  of  the  fittest/' 

This  "struggle  for  life"  is  either  against 
the  forces  of  inorganic  or  those  of  organic 
nature.  Among  the  former  are  storms,  floods, 
intense  cold,  long-continued  droughts,  or  vio- 
lent blizzards,  all  of  which  take  toll  of  the 
weaker  or  less  wary  individuals  of  each 
species — those  that  are  less  adapted  to  survive 
such  conditions.  In  judging  how  this  would 
act,  we  must  always  remember  the  enormous 
scale  on  which  Nature  works,  and  that, 
although  now  and  then  a  few  of  the  weaker 
individuals  may  live  and  a  few  of  the  stronger 
be  killed,  yet  when  we  deal  with  hundreds  of 
millions,  of  which  eighty  or  ninety  millions 
inevitably  die  every  year,  while  about  ten 

96 


Selection  in  the  Animal  World 

or  twenty  millions  only  survive,  it  is  im- 
possible to  believe  that  those  which  survive, 
not  one  year  only,  but  year  after  year  through- 
out the  whole  existence  of  each  species,  are 
not  on  the  average  better  adapted  to  the 
complex  conditions  of  their  environment  than 
those  which  succumb  to  it.  It  is  a  mere 
truism  that  the  fittest  survive. 

Exactly  the  same  thing  occurs  in  the  case 
of  the  organic  environment,  to  which  each 
species  must  also  be  well  adapted  in  order 
to  live.  The  two  great  essentials  for  animal 
existence  are,  to  obtain  abundant  food  through 
successive  years,  and  to  be  able  to  escape  from 
their  various  enemies.  When  food  is  scarce 
the  strongest,  or  those  who  can  feed  quickest 
and  digest  more  rapidly,  or  those  that  can 
detect  food  at  greater  distances  or  reach  it 
more  quickly,  will  have  the  advantage. 
Enemies  are  escaped  by  strength,  by  swift- 
ness, by  acute  vision,  by  wariness,  or  by 
colors  which  conceal  the  various  species  in 
their  natural  surroundings,  and  those  which 
possess  these  or  any  other  advantages  will  in 
the  long  run  survive.  The  weaker,  the  less 
well-defended,  and  the  smaller  species  often 

97 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

have  special  protection,  such  as  nocturnal 
habits,  making  burrows  in  the  earth,  possess- 
ing poisonous  stings  or  fangs,  being  covered 
with  protective  armor,  while  great  numbers 
are  colored  or  marked  so  as  exactly  to  corre- 
spond with  their  surroundings,  and  are  thus 
concealed  from  their  chief  enemies. 

Natural  Selection,  or  Survival  of  the 
Fittest 

It  may  be  here  noted  that  the  term  "natu- 
ral selection,"  which  has  often  been  mis- 
understood, was  suggested  to  Darwin  by  the 
way  in  which  almost  all  our  varieties  of 
cultivated  plants  and  domestic  animals  have 
been  obtained  from  wild  forms  continually 
improved  for  many  generations.  The  method 
is  to  breed  large  quantities,  and  always  pre- 
serve or  "select"  the  best  in  each  generation 
to  be  the  parents  of  the  next.  This  method, 
carried  on  by  hundreds  of  farmers,  gardeners, 
dog,  horse,  or  poultry  breeders,  and  especially 
by  pigeon-fanciers,  has  resulted  in  all  those 
useful,  beautiful,  and  even  wonderful  varieties 
of  fruits,  vegetables,  and  flowers,  dray-horses 
and  hunters,  greyhounds,  spaniels  and  bull- 

98 


Selection  in  the  Animal  World 

dogs,  cows  which  give  large  quantities  of  the 
richest  milk,  and  sheep  with  the  greatest 
quantity  and  finest  quality  of  wool.  All  these 
were  produced  gradually  for  the  special  pur- 
poses of  mankind;  but  a  similar  result  has 
been  effected  by  Nature  through  rapid  in- 
crease, great  variability,  and  continual  destruc- 
tion of  all  the  individuals  less  adapted  to  the 
conditions  of  their  special  environment,  so 
that  only  the  strongest  or  the  swiftest,  the 
best-concealed  or  the  most  wary,  the  best 
armed  with  teeth,  horns,  hoofs  or  claws, 
those  who  could  swim  best,  or  those  that 
protected  each  other  by  keeping  in  flocks  or 
herds,  lived  the  longest  and  tended  to  im- 
prove still  further  the  next  generation.  "Sur- 
vival of  the  fittest"  was  suggested  by  Her- 
bert Spencer  as  best  describing  exactly  what 
happens,  and  it  is  a  most  useful  descriptive 
term  which  should  always  be  kept  in  mind 
when  discussing  or  investigating  the  process 
by  which  the  infinitely  varied  and  beautiful 
productions  of  Nature  have  been  developed. 
There  is  really  not  one  single  part  or  organ 
of  any  plant  or  animal  that  cannot  have 
been  derived  by  means  of  the  fundamental 

99 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

facts  of  variability  and  reproduction  from 
some  allied  plant  or  animal. 

It  is  interesting  here  ttTnote  that  the  two 
essential  factors  of  the  process  of  constant 
adaptation  to  the  environment  by  great 
variability  and  rapid  multiplication  formed 
no  part  of  Lamarck's  theory,  which  some 
people  still  think  to  be  as  good  as  Darwin's. 
Equally  suggestive  is  the  fact  that,  while 
extensive  groups  of  life-phenomena,  such  a& 
color,  weapons,  hair,  scales,  and  feathers  can 
hardly  be  conceived  as  having  been  produced 
or  modified  by  effort  or  by  the  direct  action 
of  the  environment,  they  are  yet,  every  one 
of  them,  perfectly  explained  by  the  funda- 
mental and  necessary  processes  of  variability 
and  survival,  acting  slowly  and  continuously, 
but  with  intermittent  periods  of  extreme 
activity  at  long  intervals,  on  all  living 
things. 

One  of  the  weakest  and  most  foolish  of  all 
the  objections  to  the  Darwinian  theory  is, 
that  it  does  not  explain  variation,  and  is 
therefore  worthless.  We  might  as  well  say 
that  Newton's  discovery  of  the  laws  of 
gravitation  was  worthless  because  its  cause 


100 


Selection  in  the  Animal  World 

was  not  and  has  not  yet  been  discovered, 
or  that  the  undulatory  theory  of  light  and 
heat  is  worthless,  because  the  origin  of  the 
ether,  the  thing  that  undulates,  is  not  known. 
The  beginnings  of  things  can  never  be  known, 
and,  as  Darwin  well  said,  it  is  foolish  to 
waste  time  in  speculation  about  them.  I 
think  I  have  shown  in  my  World  of  Life  that 
infinite  variability  is  a  basic  law  of  Nature 
and  have  suggested  its  probable  purpose. 
That  purpose  seems  to  have  been  the  devel- 
opment of  a  life-world  culminating  in  Man — 
a  being  capable  of  studying,  and  enjoying, 
and  to  some  extent  comprehending,  the  vast 
universe  around  him,  from  the  microscopic 
life  in  almost  every  drop  of  water  to  the 
whirling  nebulae  of  the  glittering  star-depths 
extending  to  almost  unimaginable  distances 
around  him. 

Looking  at  him  thus,  man  is  as  much 
above,  and  as  different  from,  the  beasts  that 
perish  as  they  are  above  and  beyond  the 
inanimate  masses  of  meteoritic  matter  which, 
as  we  now  know,  occupy  the  apparently 
vacant  spaces  of  our  solar  system,  and  from 
which  comets  and  stars  are  in  all  probability 

101 


. 


Environment 'and  Moral  Progress 

the  aggregations  due  to  the  action  of  the 
various  cosmic  forces  which  everywhere  seem 
capable  of  producing  variety  and  order 
out  of  a  more  uniform  but  less  orderly 
chaos. 

But  besides  this  lofty  intellect,  man  is 
gifted  with  what  we  term  a  moral  sense:  an 
insistent  perception  of  justice  and  injustice, 
of  right  and  wrong,  of  order  and  beauty  and 
truth,  which  as  a  whole  constitute  his  moral 
and  esthetic  nature,  the  origin  and  progress 
of  which  I  have  endeavored  to  throw  some 
light  upon  in  the  present  volume.  The  long 
course  of  human  history  leads  us  to  the  con- 
clusion that  this  higher  nature  of  man  arose 
at  some  far  distant  epoch,  and  though  it 
has  developed  in  various  directions,  does  not 
seem  yet  to  have  elevated  the  whole  race  much 
above  its  earliest  condition,  at  the  time  when, 
by  the  influx  of  some  portion  of  the 
spirit  of  the  Deity,  man  became  "a  living 
soul." 

We  will  now  consider  some  of  the  changes 
which  this  higher  nature  of  man  has  pro- 
duced In  the  action  of  the  laws  of  variation 
and  natural  selec  :>n.  These  are  very  im- 

102 


Selection  in  the  Animal  World 

portant,  and  are  so  little  understood  that 
almost  all  popular  writers  on  the  subject  of 
the  future  of  mankind  are  led  into  stating 
as  scientific  conclusions  what  are  wholly  op- 
posed to  the  actual  teaching  of  evolution. 


103 


CHAPTER  XIV 

SELECTION  AS  MODIFIED  BY  MIND 

THE  theory  of  natural  selection  as  expounded 
by  Darwin  was  so  completely  successful  in 
explaining  the  origin  of  the  almost  infinitely 
varied  forms  of  the  organic  world,  step  by 
step,  during  the  long  succession  of  the  geolog- 
ical ages,  that  it  was  naturally  supposed  to 
be  equally  applicable  to  mankind.  This  was 
thought  to  be  almost  certain  when,  in  his  later 
work,  The  Descent  of  Man,  Darwin  proved 
by  a  series  of  converging  facts  and  con- 
vincing arguments  that  the  physical  structure 
of  man  was  in  all  its  parts  and  organs  so  ex- 
tremely similar  to  that  of  the  anthropoid 
apes  as  to  demonstrate  the  descent  of  both 
from  some  common  ancestor. 

So  close  is  this  resemblance  that  every 
bone  and  muscle  in  the  human  body  has 
its  counterpart  in  that  of  the  apes,  the  only 
differences  being  slight  modifications  in  their 
shape  and  position;  yet  these  differences  lead 

104 


Selection  Modified  by  Mind 

to  external  forms,  attitudes,  and  modes  of 
life  so  divergent  that  we  can  hardly  recognize 
the  close  affinity  that  really  exists.  This 
affinity  is  so  real  and  unmistakable  that  such 
a  great  and  conservative  zoologist  as  the  late 
Sir  Richard  Owen  declared  that  to  discover 
and  define  any  important  differences  between 
them  was  the  anatomist's  difficulty.  It  was 
in  the  dimensions,  the  shape,  and  the  pro- 
portions of  the  brain  that  Owen  found  a  suf- 
ficient amount  of  distinctive  characters  to 
enable  him  to  place  Man  in  a  separate  order 
of  mammals — Bimana,  or  two-handed — while 
the  remainder  of  the  whole  monkey  tribe — 
including  the  apes,  baboons,  monkeys,  and 
lemurs — formed  the  order  Quadrumana,  or 
four-handed  animals.  This  classification  has 
been  rejected  by  most  modern  biologists, 
who  consider  man  to  form  a  distant  family 
only — Hominidae — of  the  order  Primates, 
which  order  includes  all  four-handed  animals 
as  well  as  man. 

But  if  we  recognize  the  brain  as  the  organ 
of  the  mind,  and  give  due  weight  to  the 
complete  distinctness  and  enormous  supe- 
riority of  the  mind  of  man  as  compared  with 

105 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

that  of  all  other  mammals,  we  shall  be  in- 
clined to  accept  Owen's  view  as  the  most 
natural;  and  this  becomes  almost  certain 
when  we  realize  the  enormous  effect  his 
mind  has  produced,  in  modifying  and  al- 
most neutralizing  the  action  of  that  great  law 
of  natural  selection  which  has  held  supreme 
sway  in  every  other  portion  of  the  organic 
world. 

We  have  seen  in  the  preceding  chapter 
how  every  form  of  organic  life  during  all  the 
vast  extent  of  geological  time  has  been  sub- 
ject to  the  law  of  natural  selection,  which  has 
incessantly  moulded  their  bodily  form  and 
structure,  external  and  internal,  in  strict 
adaptation  to  the  successive  changes  of  the 
world  around  them,  while  that  world  was  it- 
self hardly,  if  at  all,  modified  by  them.  A 
few  isolated  cases — such  as  the  formation 
of  islands  by  the  coral-forming  zoophytes, 
or  the  damming  of  a  few  rivers  by  the  rude 
though  very  remarkable  labors  of  the  beaver 
— can  hardly  be  considered  as  forming  ex- 
ceptions to  this  law. 

But  so  soon  as  man  appeared  upon  the 
earth,  even  in  the  earliest  periods  at  which  we 

1 06 


Selection  Modified  by  Mind 

have  any  proofs  of  his  existence,  or  in  the 
lowest  state  of  barbarism  in  which  we  are  now 
able  to  study  him,  we  find  him  able  to  use 
and  act  upon  the  forces  of  Nature,  and  to 
modify  his  environment,  both  inorganic  and 
organic,  in  ways  which  formed  a  completely 
new  departure  in  the  entire  organic  world. 

Among  the  very  rudest  of  modern  savages 
the  wounded  or  the  sick  are  assisted,  at  least 
with  food  and  shelter,  and  often  in  other  ways, 
so  that  they  recover  under  circumstances  that 
to  most  of  the  higher  animals  would  be  fatal. 
Neither  does  less  robust  health  or  vigor,  or 
even  the  loss  of  a  limb  or  of  eyesight,  neces- 
sarily entail  death.  The  less  fit  are  therefore, 
not  eliminated  as  among  all  other  animals' 
and  we  behold,  for  the  first  time  in  the  history 
of  the  world,  the  great  law  of  natural  selection 
by  the  survival  only  of  "the  fittest"  to  some 
extent  neutralized. 

But  this  is  only  the  first  and  least  impor- 
tant of  the  effects  produced  by  the  superior 
faculties  of  man.  In  the  whole  animal  world, 
as  we  have  seen,  every  species  is  preserved  in 
harmony  with  the  slowly  changing  environ- 
ment by  modifications  of  its  own  organs  or 

107 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

faculties,  thus  gradually  leading  to  the  pro- 
duction of  new  species  equally  adapted  to  the 
new  environment  as  its  ancestor  was  before 
the  change  occurred. 

In  the  case  of  man,  however,  such  bodily 
adaptations  were  unnecessary,  because  his 
greatly  superior  mind  enabled  him  to  meet 
all  such  difficulties  in  a  new  and  different 
way.  As  soon  as  his  specially  human  facul- 
ties were  developed  (and  we  have  as  yet  no 
knowledge  of  him  in  any  earlier  condition), 
he  would  cease  to  be  influenced  by  natural 
selection  in  his  physical  form  and  structure. 
Looked  at  as  a  mere  animal  he  would  remain 
almost  stationary,  the  changes  in  the  sur- 
rounding universe  ceasing  to  produce  in  him 
that  powerful  modifying  effect  which  they 
exercise  over  all  other  members  of  the  entire 
organic  world.  In  order  to  protect  himself 
from  the  larger  and  fiercer  of  the  mammalia 
he  made  use  of  weapons,  such  as  stone-headed 
clubs,  wooden  spears,  bows  and  arrows,  and 
various  kinds  of  traps  and  snares,  all  of 
which  are  exceedingly  effective  when  families 
or  larger  groups  combine  in  their  use.  Against 
the  severity  of  the  seasons  he  protected  him- 

108 


Selection  Modified  by  Mind 

self  with  a  clothing  of  skins,  and  with  some 
form  of  shelter  or  well-built  house,  in  which 
he  could  rest  securely  at  night,  free  from 
tempestuous  rain  or  the  attacks  of  wild  beasts. 
By  the  use  of  fire  he  was  enabled  to  render 
both  roots  and  flesh  more  palatable  and  more 
digestible,  thus  increasing  the  variety  and 
abundance  of  his  food  far  beyond  that  of  any 
species  of  the  lower  animals.  Yet  further, 
by  the  simplest  forms  of  cultivation,  he  was 
able  to  increase  the  best  of  the  fruits,  the 
roots,  the  tubers,  as  well  as  the  more  nutritious 
of  the  seeds,  such  as  those  of  rice  and  maize, 
of  wheat  and  of  barley,  thus  securing  in  con- 
venient proximity  to  his  dwelling-place  an 
abundance  of  food  to  supply  all  his  wants 
and  render  him  almost  always  secure 
against  scarcity  or  famine  or  disastrous 
droughts. 

We  see,  then,  that  with  the  advent  of  Man 
there  had  come  into  existence  a  being  in  whom 
that  subtle  force  we  term  mind  became  of 
far  more  importance  than  mere  bodily  struc- 
ture. Though  with  a  naked  and  unprotected 
body,  this  gave  him  clothing  against  the 
varied  inclemencies  of  the  seasons.  Though 

109 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

unable  to  compete  with  the  deer  in  swiftness 
or  with  the  wild  bull  in  strength,  this  gave 
him  weapons  with  which  to  capture  or  over- 
come both.  Though  less  capable  than  most 
other  animals  of  living  on  the  herbs  and  the 
fruits  that  unaided  Nature  supplies,  this  won- 
derful faculty  taught  him  to  govern  and 
direct  Nature  to  his  own  benefit,  and  com- 
pelled her  to  produce  food  for  him  almost 
where  and  when  he  pleased.  From  the 
moment  when  the  first  skin  was  used  as  a 
covering,  when  the  first  rude  spear  was 
formed  to  assist  him  in  the  chase,  when  fire 
was  first  used  to  cook  his  food,  when  the  first 
seed  was  sown  or  shoot  planted,  a  grand  rev- 
olution was  effected  in  Nature — a  revolu- 
tion which  in  all  previous  ages  of  the  earth's 
history  had  had  no  parallel.  A  being  had 
arisen  who  was  no  longer  subject  to  bodily 
change  with  changes  of  the  physical  universe 
— a  being  who  was  in  some  degree  superior  to 
Nature,  inasmuch  as  he  knew  how  to  control 
and  regulate  her  action,  and  could  keep  him- 
self in  harmony  with  her,  not  through  any 
change  in  his  body,  but  by  means  of  his  vast 
superiority  in  mind. 


no 


Selection  Modified  by  Mind 

The  view  above  expounded  of  the  trans- 
ference of  the  action  of  natural  selection  from 
the  bodily  structure  to  the  mind  of  early 
man  was  my  first  original  modification  of  that 
theory,  having  been  communicated  to  the 
Anthropological  Review  in  1864.  It  received 
the  approval  both  of  Darwin  himself  and  of 
Herbert  Spencer,  and  I  am  not  aware  that  any- 
one has  shown  any  flaw  in  the  reasoning  by 
which  it  is  established.  It  is  certainly  of 
high  importance,  since  if  true  it  renders  im- 
possible any  important  change  in  the  external 
form  of  mankind,  while  it  serves  as  an  ex- 
planation of  the  complete  identity  of  specific 
type  of  the  three  great  races  of  man — the 
Caucasian  or  white,  the  Mongolian  or  yellow, 
and  the  Negroid  or  black — in  every  essential 
of  human  form  and  structure,  while  in  their 
best  examples  they  approach  very  nearly  to 
the  same  ideal  of  symmetry  and  of  beauty. 
Yet  so  little  attention  has  been  given  to  this 
view  that  most  popular  and  even  some  scien- 
tific writers  take  it  for  granted  that  no  such 
difference  exists  between  man  and  the  lower 
animals.  They  assume  that  we  are  destined 
to  have  our  bodies  modified  in  the  remote 

in 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

future  in  some  unknown  way,  and  that  the 
idea  that  there  is  anything  approaching  final 
perfection  in  the  human  form  is  a  mere  fig- 
ment of  the  imagination. 

Others  are  so  imbued  with  the  universality 
of  natural  selection  as  a  beneficial  law  of  Na- 
ture that  they  object  to  our  interfering  with  its 
action  in,  as  they  urge,  the  elimination  of  the 
unfit  by  disease  and  death,  even  when  such  dis- 
eases are  caused  by  the  insanitary  conditions 
of  our  modern  cities  or  the  misery  and  destitu- 
tion due  to  our  irrational  and  immoral  social 
system.  Such  writers  entirely  ignore  the  un- 
doubted fact  that  affection,  sympathy,  com- 
passion form  as  essential  a  part  of  human 
nature  as  do  the  higher  intellectual  and  moral 
faculties;  that  in  the  very  earliest  periods  of 
history  and  among  the  very  lowest  of  exist- 
ing savages  they  are  fully  manifested,  not 
merely  between  the  members  of  the  same 
family,  but  throughout  the  whole  tribe,  and 
also  in  most  cases  to  every  stranger  who  is 
not  a  known  or  imagined  enemy.  The  earliest 
book  of  travels  I  remember  hearing  read  by 
my  father  was  that  of  Mungo  Park,  one  of  the 
first  explorers  of  the  Niger.  He  was  once 


112 


Selection  Modified  by  Mind 

alone  and  sick  there,  and  some  negro  women 
nursed  him,  fed  him,  and  saved  his  life;  and 
while  lying  in  their  hut  he  heard  them  sing- 
ing about  him  as  the  poor  white  man,  of 
whom  they  said: — 

"He  has  no  mother  to  give  him  milk, 
No  wife  to  grind  his  corn." 

Hospitality  is,  in  fact,  one  of  the  most 
general  of  all  human  virtues,  and  in  some  cases 
is  almost  a  religion.  It  is  an  inherent  part  of 
what  constitutes  "human  nature/'  and  it 
is  directly  antagonistic  to  the  rigid  law  of 
natural  selection  which  has  universally  pre- 
vailed throughout  the  lower  animal  world. 
Those  who  advocate  our  allowing  natural 
selection  to  have  free  play  among  ourselves, 
on  the  ground  that  we  are  interfering  with 
Nature,  are  totally  ignorant  of  what  they  are 
talking  about.  It  is  Nature  herself,  untaught 
unsophisticated  human  nature,  which  they  are 
seeking  to  interfere  with.  They  seek  to  de- 
grade the  higher  nature  to  the  level  of  the 
lower,  to  bring  down  Heaven-born  humanity, 
in  its  essential  characteristics  only  a  little  lower 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

than  the  angels,  to  the  infinitely  lower  level 
of  the  beasts  that  perish. 

The  conclusion  reached  in  the  earlier  por- 
tion of  this  volume,  that  the  higher  intellec- 
tual and  moral  nature  of  man  has  been 
approximately  stationary  during  the  whole 
period  of  human  history,  and  that  the  cause 
of  the  phenomenon  has  been  the  absence  of 
any  selective  agency  adequate  to  increase 
it,  renders  it  necessary  to  give  some  further 
explanation  as  to  the  probable  or  possible 
origin  of  this  higher  nature,  and  also  of  that 
admirable  human  body  which  also  appears 
to  have  reached  a  condition  of  permanent 
stability. 


114 


CHAPTER  XV 

THE   LAWS   OF    HEREDITY   AND   ENVIRONMENT 

IN  dealing  with  the  great  problems  of  or- 
ganic development  there  is  probably  no  de- 
partment in  which  so  much  error  and  mis- 
conception prevails  as  on  the  nature  and 
limitations  of  Heredity.  These  misconcep- 
tions not  only  pervade  most  popular  writ- 
ings on  the  subject  of  evolution,  but  even 
those  of  men  of  science  and  of  specialists  in 
biology,  and  they  are  the  more  important  and 
dangerous  because  their  promulgators  are 
able  to  quote  Herbert  Spencer,  and  to  a  less 
extent  Darwin,  as  holding  similar  views. 

The  subject  is  of  special  importance  here 
because  it  involves  the  question  of  whether 
the  effects  of  the  environment,  including 
education  and  training,  are  in  any  degree 
transmitted  from  the  individuals  so  modified 
to  their  progeny — whether  they  are  or  are  not 
cumulative.  It  is,  in  fact,  the  much  dis- 
cussed and  vitally  important  problem  of  the 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

Heredity  of  Acquired  Characters.  The  ef- 
fects of  use  and  disuse,  another  form  of  the 
same  general  phenomenon,  were  assumed  by 
Lamarck  to  be  inherited,  and  a  large  portion 
of  his  theory  of  evolution  rested  on  this  as- 
sumption; it  seemed  so  probable,  and  was 
apparently  supported  by  so  many  facts,  that 
Darwin,  like  most  other  naturalists  at  the 
time,  accepted  it  without  any  special  inquiry, 
and  when  he  worked  out  his  theory  of  Pan- 
genesis  in  order  to  explain  the  main  facts  of 
heredity,  his  suppositions  were  adapted  to 
include  such  phenomena.  Let  us  then  first 
explain  what  is  meant  by  the  "acquired 
characters"  which  it  was  thought  that  a  true 
theory  of  heredity  must  explain. 

As  a  rule,  the  great  majority  of  the'peculiari- 
ties  of  any  species  of  animal  or  plant  are  con- 
stantly reproduced  in  its  offspring/  The 
short  tail  of  the  wren,  the  much  longer  tail 
of  the  long-tailed  tit,  the  crest  of  the  crested 
tit  and  of  innumerable  other  birds,  always 
when  full-grown  exhibit  the  same  characters 
as  in  their  parents.  These  are  said  to  be 
inngjg  characters.  In  rare  cases,  however, 
offspring  are  born  which  differ  materially 

116 


Heredity  and  Environment 

from  their  parents,  as  when  a  white  black- 
bird or  a  six-toed  kitten  appears,  but  these 
are  equally  innate,  and  are  often  strongly 
inherited.  All  these  are  subject  to  variation, 
and  can  therefore  be  modified  by  selection, 
whether  natural  or  artificial,  and  the  effects 
of  such  selection  in  the  case  of  domestic 
animals  is  often  enormous.  Such  are  the 
pouters  and  tumblers  among  pigeons,  the 
bull-dog  and  the  greyhound,  the  numerous 
breeds  of  poultry,  all  of  which  are  known  to 
have  been  produced  by  artificial  selections  of 
favorable  variations  extending  over  many 
centuries;  and  the  characters  of  these  varieties 
are  all  strongly  inherited. 

Characters  which  are  acquired  during  the 
life  of  the  individual  owing  to  differences  in 
the  use  of  certain  organs  or  of  exposure  to 
light,  heat,  drought,  wind,  moisture,  etc., 
are  comparatively  very  slight,  and  are  liable 
to  be  so  combined  with  innate  characters  and 
with  the  effects  of  natural  or  artificial  selec- 
tion, that  it  is  exceedingly  difficult  to  ascer- 
tain, without  such  careful  and  long-continued 
experiments  as  have  not  yet  been  made, 

whether  they  are  in  any  degree  transmissible 

117 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

from  parent  to  offspring,  and  therefore  cumula- 
tive. 

Almost  every  individual  case  of  supposed 
inheritance  of  such  characters,  when  care- 
fully examined,  has  been  found  to  be  ex- 
plicable in  other  ways;  but  there  is  a  very 
large  amount  of  general  evidence,  demon- 
strating that  even  if  a  certain  small  amount  of 
such  inheritance  exists,  it  can  certainly  not 
be  a  factor  of  any  importance  in  the  process 
of  organic  evolution,  all  the  factors  of  which 
must  be  universally  present  because  the  proc- 
ess itself  is  universal.  I  will  therefore  here 
limit  myself  to  a  short  enumeration  of  a  few 
of  the  very  numerous  cases  in  which  the  con- 
tinued use  of  an  organ  does  not  strengthen  or 
improve  it,  but  often  the  reverse,  and  of 
others  in  which  it  cannot  be  asserted  that 
the  action  of  the  environment  can  have  had 
any  part  whatever  in  the  continuous  change 
or  specialization  of  the  part  or  organ.  The 
number,  size,  form,  position,  and  composi- 
tion of  the  teeth  of  all  the  mammalia  are 
extremely  varied,  and  throughout  the  whole 
class  afford  the  best  characters  to  distinguish 
family  and  generic  groups;  they  are  therefore 

118 


Heredity  and  Environment 

of  great  value  in  determining  the  affinities  of 
extinct  forms,  because  the  jaws  and  teeth, 
especially  the  latter,  are  most  frequently 
preserved.  But  as  the  permanent  teeth  are 
fully  formed  while  buried  in  the  jawbones 
and  covered  by  the  gums,  it  is  quite  certain 
that  the  special  adaptation  of  the  teeth  of  each 
species  to  seize,  crush,  tear,  or  grind  up  its 
particular  food  cannot  possibly  have  been 
produced  by  the  act  of  feeding,  the  effect  of 
which  is  almost  always  to  grind  away  the 
teeth  and  render  them  less  serviceable.  Such 
adaptation  could  not  possibly  have  been  pro- 
duced by  use  alone,  or  any  other  direct  action 
of  the  environment.  Yet,  as  the  adaptation 
is  clear,  and  often  very  remarkable,  some 
eminent  palaeontologists  have  declared  it  to 
be  proved  that  the  changes  in  them  were 
produced  by  the  changes  in  the  environment, 
and  that  they  constitute  very  strong  evidence 
of  the  "inheritance  of  acquired  characters" 
— a  statement  unsupported  by  any  direct 
evidence. 

The  same  objection  applies  to  most  of  the 
special  organs  of  sense.  The  internal  organ 
of  hearing  is  a  highly  complex  series  of  bones 

119 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

and  membranes,  protected  by  the  outer  ear; 
but  it  cannot  be  even  imagined  to  have  been 
gradually  developed  by  the  action  of  the 
air  waves,  the  vibrations  of  which  it  conveys 
to  the  brain. 

The  eye  is  a  still  more  striking  case,  as 
too  much  use  injures  or  even  destroys  it; 
while  specialties  of  vision,  as  long  or  short 
sight,  are  undoubtedly  innate,  and  usually 
persist  throughout  life. 

So  the  wonderfully  varied  bills  of  birds 
cannot  be  conceived  as  having  been  modi- 
fied by  use,  and  are,  in  fact,  unchange- 
able when  once  formed.  Yet,  as  they  vary 
largely  in  every  species,  they  are  readily 
modified,  so  as  to  become  adapted  to  new 
conditions  by  the  "survival  of  the  fittest." 

Equally  impossible  is  it  to  connect  any 
use  or  disuse,  or  environmental  action,  in 
the  production,  the  gradual  development,  or 
complete  adaptation  to  their  conditions  of 
life  of  the  outer  coverings  of  almost  all  living 
things — the  hair  of  mammalia,  the  feathers 
of  birds,  the  scales  or  horny  skins  or  solid 
shields  of  reptiles,  the  solid  shells  of  molluscs, 
wonderfully  ribbed  or  spined,  whorled,  or 


120 


Heredity  and  Environment 

turreted,  and  infinitely  varied  in  surface 
color  and  markings.  Even  more  conclusive 
are  the  facts  presented  by  the  vast  hosts  of 
the  insect  world,  from  the  massive  armor  of 
the  ever-present  beetle  tribe,  more  varied 
in  form,  structure,  ornament,  and  color  than 
any  other  comparable  group  of  living  things, 
to  the  widely  different  lepidoptera,  equalling, 
or  perhaps  surpassing,  the  whole  class  of 
birds  in  their  marvellous  grace  and  beauty, 
yet  all  utterly  beyond  any  possible  direct 
action  of  the  environment  or  of  use  and 
disuse  in  their  development,  and  their  close 
adaptation  to  that  environment. 

Organic  nature  is  indisputably  one  and 
indivisible.  It  has  been  developed  through- 
out by  means  of  the  fundamental  forces  of 
life,  of  growth  and  reproduction,  and  the 
equally  fundamental  laws  of  variation,  hered- 
ity, and  enormous  increase,  resulting  in  a 
perpetual  adaptation  in  form,  structure,  color, 
and  habits  to  the  slowly  changing  environ- 
ment. These  forces  and  laws  are  universal 
in  their  action;  they  are  demonstrably  ade- 
quate to  the  production  of  the  whole  of  the 
phenomena  we  are  now  discussing.  We  see, 


121 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

then,  that  over  by  far  the  greater  part  of  the 
whole  world  of  life  any  modification  of  ex- 
ternal structure,  form,  or  coloring  during  the 
life  of  the  individual  is  impossible,  while  in 
the  remainder  its  action,  if  it  exists  at  all, 
is  of  very  limited  range.  No  adequate  proof 
of  the  inheritance  of  the  slight  changes  thus 
caused  has  ever  yet  been  given,  and  it  is 
therefore  wholly  unnecessary  and  illogical  to 
assume  its  existence  and  to  adduce  it  as 
having  any  part  in  the  ever-active  and  uni- 
versal process  of  evolution. 

Throughout  the  whole  series  of  the  animal 
world,  and  especially  in  the  higher  groups 
which  approach  nearest  to  ourselves,  mental 
and  physical  characters  are  so  inextricably 
intermixed  in  their  relation  to  the  laws  of 
evolution  and  heredity,  that  either  of  them, 
studied  separately,  leads  us  to  the  same 
conclusions.  We  are  not,  therefore,  surprised 
to  find  that  breeders  of  animals  of  all  kinds 
act  upon  the  principle  that  all  the  qualities 
of  the  various  stocks,  whether  bodily  or 
mental,  are  innate  and  have  been  due  to 
selection;  while  training,  though  necessary 
to  bring  out  the  good  qualities  of  the  individ- 

122 


Heredity  and  Environment 

ual,  has  had  no  part  in  the  production  of 
those  qualities.  When  a  horse  or  dog  of  good 
pedigree  is  accidentally  injured  so  that  it 
cannot  be  regularly  trained,  it  is  still  used 
for  breeding  purposes  without  any  doubt  as 
to  its  conveying  to  its  progeny  the  highest 
qualities  of  its  parentage. 

In  the  case  of  the  human  race,  however, 
many  writers  thoughtlessly  speak  of  the 
hereditary  effects  of  strength  or  skill  due  to 
any  mechanical  work  or  special  art  being 
continued  generation  after  generation  in  the 
same  family,  as  among  the  castes  of  India. 
But  of  any  progressive  improvement  there  is 
no  evidence  whatever.  Those  children  who 
had  a  natural  agtitude.,  for  the  work  would, 
of  course,  form  the  successors  of  their 
parents,  and  there  is  no  proof  of  anything 
hereditary  except  as  regards  this  innate^ 
aptitude. 

Many  people  are  alarmed  at  the  statement 
that  the  effects  of  education  and  training 
are  not  hereditary,  and  think  that  if  that 
were  really  the  case  there  would  be  no  hope 
of  improvement  of  the  race;  but  closer  con- 
sideration will  show  them  that  if  the  results 

123 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

of  our  education  in  the  widest  sense,  in  the 
home,  in  the  shop,  in  the  nation,  and  in  the 
world  at  large,  had  really  been  hereditary, 
even  in  the  slightest  degree,  then  indeed  there 
would  be  little  hope  for  humanity;  and  there 
is  no  clearer  proof  of  this  than  the  fact  that 
we  have  not  all  been  made  much  worse — 
the  wonder  being  that  any  fragment  of 
morality,  or  humanity,  or  the  love  of  truth 
or  justice  for  their  own  sakes  still  exists 
among  us. 

If  we  glance  through  the  past  history  of 
mankind  we  see  an  almost  unbroken  suc- 
cession of  aggression  and  combat  between 
the  various  races,  nations,  and  tribes.  We 
can  dimly  see  that  this  continual  struggle 
did  lead  to  a  rather  severe  process  of  selec- 
tion, as  in  the  lower  animal  world.  It  can 
hardly  be  doubted  that  as  a  result  of  these 
struggles  the  strongest  physically,  the  most 
ingenious  in  the  use  of  weapons,  and  the 
best  organized  for  war  did  survive,  and  that 
the  weaker  and  lower  were  either  exterminated 
or  kept  as  slaves  by  the  conquerors.  This 
leads  to  alternation  of  success  and  failure. 

124 


Heredity  and  Environment 

We  see  great  conquerors  and  great  material 
civilizations  as  a  result  of  their  accumula- 
tions of  wealth  and  of  slaves.  Then,  for  a 
time,  luxury  and  the  arts  flourished,  and  with 
them  came  rulers  who  encouraged  degrada- 
tion and  vice  at  home,  supported  by  more 
and  more  remote  conquests.  Then  new 
conquerors  arose,  often  lower  in  civilization 
— barbarians,  as  they  were  termed — but  higher 
in  the  simple  domestic  virtues  and  a  more 
natural  life  of  productive  labor.  These  again, 
or  some  portions  of  them,  rose  to  luxury  and 
civilization,  to  lives  of  gross  sensuality  and 
the  most  cruel  despotism,  till  outraged  hu- 
manity raised  up  new  conquerors  to  go  over 
again  the  old  terrible  routine. 

The  periods  of  culmination  of  these  old 
civilizations,  founded  always  on  conquest, 
massacre,  and  slavery,  are  marked  out  for  us 
by  the  ruins  of  great  cities,  temples,  and 
palaces,  often  of  wonderful  grandeur,  and 
with  indications  of  arts,  science,  and  literature, 
which  still  excite  our  admiration  in  Egypt 
and  India,  Greece  and  Rome,  and  thence 
through  the  Middle  Ages  down  to  our  own 
time.  But  the  inhumanities  and  horrors  of 

125 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

these  periods  are  inconceivable.  A  gloomy 
picture  of  them  is  given  in  that  powerful 
book,  The  Martyrdom  of  Man,  by  Winwood 
Reade;  and  they  are  summarized  in  Burns' 
fine  lines: 

"Man's  inhumanity  to  man 
Makes  countless  thousands  mourn." 

Think  of  the  horrors  of  war  in  the  per- 
petual wars  of  those  days  before  the  "Red 
Cross"  service  did  anything  to  alleviate  them. 
Think  of  the  old  castles,  many  of  which  had 
besides  the  dungeons  a  salaried  torturer  and 
executioner.  Think  of  the  systematic  tor- 
tures of  the  centuries,  of  the  witchcraft 
mania  and  of  the  Inquisition.  Think  of  the 
burnings  in  Smithfield  and  in  every  great 
city  of  Europe.  Think  of 

"Truth  for  ever  on  the  scaffold, 
Wrong  for  ever  on  the  throne." 

Freedom  of  speech,  even  of  thought,  were 
everywhere  crimes:  how,  then,  did  the  love 
of  truth  survive  as  an  ideal  of  today?  To 
escape  these  horrors,  the  gentle,  the  good, 

126 


Heredity  and  Environment 

the  learned,  and  the  peaceful  had  to  seek 
refuge  in  monasteries  and  nunneries,  while 
by  means  of  the  celibacy  of  the  clergy  the 
Church,  as  Gal  ton  tells  us,  "by  a  policy 
singularly  unwise  and  suicidal,  brutalized  the 
breed  of  our  forefathers." 

Here  was  the  actual  education  of  the 
world  as  man  rose  from  barbarism  to  civiliza- 
tion, and  it  was  accompanied  by  a  certain 
amount  of  retrograde  selection  by  the  cruel 
punishments,  confinement  in  dungeons,  or 
torture  and  death  of  those  who  opposed  the 
rulers,  and  by  the  survival  of  the  worst 
tools  of  the  lords  and  tyrants.  Ought  we 
not  to  be  thankful  that  such  education  and 
custom,  the  varied  influences  of  such  an 
environment,  were  not  hereditary?  And  is 
not  the  fact  that  the  whole  world  has  not 
become  utterly  degraded,  and  that  anything 
good  remains  in  our  cruelly  oppressed  human 
nature,  an  overwhelming  proof  that  such  in- 
fluences are  not  hereditary? 

When  we  remember  that  many  of  these 
degrading  laws  and  customs,  oppressions,  and 
punishments  have  extended  down  to  our  own 

times;  that  the  terrible  slave-trade  and  the 

127 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

equally  terriblelslavery  have  only  been  abolished 
within  the  memory  of  many  of  us,  and  that 
the  system  of  wage-slavery,  the  distinction 
of  classes,  the  gross  inequality  of  the  law,  the 
overwork  of  our  laboring  millions,  the  im- 
moral luxury  and  idleness  of  our  upper- 
class  thousands,  while  far  more  thousands 
die  annually  of  want  of  the  bare  necessaries 
of  life;  that  millions  have  their  lives  short- 
ened by  easily  preventable  causes,  while  other 
millions  pass  their  whole  lives  in  contin- 
uous and  almost  inhuman  labor  in  order 
to  provide  means  for  the  enjoyments  and 
pernicious  luxuries  of  the  rich — we  must  be 
amazed  at  the  fact  that  there  is  nevertheless 
so  much  real  goodness,  real  humanity,  among 
us  as  certainly  exists,  in  spite  of  all  the  de- 
grading influences  that  I  have  been  com- 
pelled here  to  enumerate. 

To  myself,  there  seems  only  one  explana- 
tion of  the  very  remarkable  and  almost  in- 
credible results  just  stated.  It  is,  that  the 
Divine  nature  in  us — that  portion  of  our  higher 
nature  which  raises  us  above  the  brutes, 
and  the  influx  of  which  makes  us  men — 
cannot  be  lost,  cannot  even  be  permanently 

128 


Heredity  and  Environment 

deteriorated  by  conditions  however  adverse, 
foy  training  however  senseless  and  bad.  It 
ever  remains  in  us,  the  central  and  essential 
portion  of  our  human  nature,  ready  to  respond 
to  every  favorable  opportunity  that  arises, 
to  grasp  and  hold  firm  every  fragment  of 
high  thought  or  noble  action  that  has  been 
brought  to  its  notice,  to  oppose  even  to  the 
death  every  falsehood  in  teaching,  every 
tyranny  in  action.  The  ethics  of  Plato  and 
of  the  great  moralists  of  the  Ciceronian  epoch, 
together  with  those  of  Jesus  and  of  His  dis- 
ciples and  followers,  kept  alive  the  sacred 
flame  of  pure  humanity,  and  their  preserva- 
tion constitutes  perhaps  the  greatest  service 
the  monastic  system  rendered  to  the  human 
race.  This  service  is  finely  expressed  by  an 
almost  unknown  poet,  J.  H.  Dell,  in  the  pre- 
fatory to  his  volume,  The  Dawning  Grey. 
Never  has  our  indebtedness  to  the  classical 
writers  been  more  powerfully  insisted  on 
than  in  the  following  lines: — 

"Hear   ye   not   the   measured   footfalls   echoing 

solemn  and  sublime, 

From  the  groves  of  Academus  down  the  avenues 
of  Time; 

129 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

See'st  thou  not  the  giant  figures  of  the  Sages  of 

the  Past, 
Through  the  darkened  long  perspective  on  the 

living  foreground  cast; 
Feel'st  thou  not   the   thrilling  rhythm  of  the 

grand  old  Grecian  line, 
Pulsing  to  the  march  of  Progress,  cadencing  her 

hymn  divine, 
All   the   forces   of  the   present  by   the  subtle 

sparks  controlled, 
Of  the  quickening  Grecian  fire,  of  the  mighty 

Lights  of  old? 

Through  the  dark  and  desolation  of  the  cen- 
turies between, 
Still  'The  Porch's*  glories  glimmer,  still  'The 

Garden's*  wreaths  are  green. 
Still  the  Zeno,  still  the  Plato,  still  the  Pyrrho 

points  the  page, 
Still  the  Philip  fears  the  pebble — still  Melitus 

dreads  the  Sage, 
Still  the  Dionysius  trembles  at  the  stylus  of  the 

age. 
Still  the  dauntless  ranks  of  Freedom  kindle  to 

Tyrtaeus'  song; 
Still    they    bear    aloft    the    symbol — bear    the 

glorious  torch  along/'* 

If  the  Christian  Church  had  done  nothing 

*  See  Note  on  pp.  137  and  138 
130 


Heredity  and  Environment 

for  us  but  preserve  in  its  monasteries  and 
abbeys  the  finest  examples  of  classic  litera- 
ture that  have  come  down  to  us,  and  given 
us  those  glories  of  Gothic  architecture  which 
seem  to  express  in  stone  the  grandeur  and 
sublimity,  the  peacefulness  and  the  beauty 
of  a  pure  religion,  it  would,  notwithstanding 
its  many  defects,  its  cruelty  and  oppression, 
its  opposition  to  the  study  of  nature  and 
to  freedom  of  thought,  have  fully  justified 
its  existence  as  helping  us  to  realize  what- 
ever more  advanced  and  purer  civilization 
the  immediate  future  may  have  in  store 
for  us. 

Some  Light  on  the  Problem  of  Evil 

Before  passing  on  to  another  branch  of 
my  subject  I  feel  it  necessary  to  make  a  few 
suggestions  in  reply  to  the  objection  that 
will  certainly  and  very  properly  be  made, 
as  to  why,  if  our  higher  human  nature  is  in 
its  essence  Divine,  it  has  suffered  such  long 
and  terrible  eclipses — why  has  the  lower 
so  often  and  for  so  long  prevailed  over  the 
higher?  This  is,  of  course,  one  of  the  many 
forms  of  the  old  problem  of  the  origin  of  evil, 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

which  is  no  doubt  insoluble  by  us.  But  as 
it  is  a  fairly  well-defined  and  limited  portion 
of  that  problem  it  may  be  possible  to  obtain 
some  idea  of  a  possible  solution,  and  as  such 
a  one  has  occurred  to  myself  during  the 
composition  of  the  present  volume,  I  will 
give  it  as  briefly  as  possible  in  the 
hope  that  it  may  interest  some  of  my 
readers. 

In  my  recent  works,  Man's  Place  in  the 
Universe  and  The  World  of  Life,  the  con- 
clusion was  forced  upon  me  that  the  scheme 
of  the  development  of  the  universe  of  stars 
and  nebulae  with  which  we  are  acquainted, 
and  especially  of  our  sun  and  solar  system, 
was  such  as  to  furnish  the  exact  conditions 
on  our  earth,  and  there  only,  which  should 
allow  of  the  origin  and  evolution  of  the  or- 
ganic world  culminating  in  man.  Yet  fur- 
ther, that  the  conditions  should  be  such  as  to 
produce  the  maximum  of  diversity  both  of 
inorganic  and  organic  products  useful  to  man, 
and  such  as  would  aid  in  the  development 
of  the  greatest  possible  diversity  of  character 
and  especially  of  his  higher  mental  and  moral 
nature.  What  I  have  here  termed  the  Divine 

132 


Heredity  and  Environment 

influx,  which  at  some  definite  epoch  in  his 
evolution  at  once  raised  man  above  the  rest 
of  the  animals,  creating  as  it  were  a  new 
being  with  a  continuous  spiritual  existence  in 
a  world  or  worlds  where  eternal  progress  was 
possible  for  him.  To  prepare  him  for  this 
progress  with  ever-increasing  diversity,  facul- 
ties of  enormous  range  were  required,  and 
these  needed  development  in  every  direction 
which  earthly  conditions  rendered  possible. 
In  order  that  this  extreme  diversity  of  charac- 
ter should  be  brought  about,  a  great  space  of 
time,  as  measured  by  successive  generations, 
was  necessary,  though  utterly  insignificant 
as  compared  with  the  preceding  duration  of 
organic  life  on  the  earth,  and  still  more  in- 
significant as  compared  with  the  spirit-life 
to  succeed  it.  It  is  for  this  purpose,  perhaps, 
that  languages  become  so  rapidly  diverse  and 
mutually  unintelligible  after  a  moderate  period 
of  isolation,  binding  together  small  or  moderate 
communities  in  distinct  tribes  or  nations, 
which  each  develop  in  their  own  way  under 
the  influence  of  special  physical  surroundings 
and  originate  peculiarities  of  habits,  customs, 
and  modes  of  thought.  Antagonisms  soon 

133 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

arise  between  adjacent  tribes,  leading  each 
to  protect  itself  against  others  by  means  of 
chiefs  and  some  quasi-military  combinations. 
This  requires  organization  and  foresight,  and 
after  a  time  the  most  powerful  conquers  the 
weaker,  they  intermingle,  and  still  greater 
diversity  arises.  By  this  constant  struggle 
the  less  advanced  suffer  most,  and  the  race 
as  a  whole  takes  a  step  forward  in  the  march 
of  civilization. 

We  see  the  best  example  of  this  mode  of 
progress  by  antagonism  in  the  small  States 
of  Ancient  Greece,  where  each  little  kingdom 
developed  its  peculiar  form  of  art,  of  govern- 
ment, and  of  civilization,  which  it  trans- 
ferred to  all  parts  of  Europe;  and  after  two 
thousand  years  of  degradation  by  Roman  and 
Turkish  conquest,  its  language  still  remains 
but  little  altered,  while  its  ancient  literature 
and  art  are  still  unsurpassed.  In  like  manner 
Rome  brought  law,  literature,  and  military 
discipline  to  an  equally  high  level;  and  it 
too  sank  into  a  state  of  ruin  and  degradation, 
while  its  literature  and  its  law  continued  to 
illuminate  the  civilized  world  during  its  long 
struggle  towards  freedom.  Wherever  con- 

134 


Heredity  and  Environment 

ditions  were  favorable  to  progress  in  art  or 
science,  time  was  needed  for  its  full  growth 
and  development,  while  perpetual  war  neces- 
sitated organization  and  training  against  con- 
quest or  destruction.  Even  the  cruelties 
and  massacres  by  despotic  rulers  excited  at 
last  the  uprising  of  the  oppressed,  and  so 
developed  the  nobler  attributes  of  patriotism, 
courage,  and  love  of  freedom.  In  the  very 
worst  of  times  there  was  an  undercurrent  of 
peaceful  labor,  art,  and  learning,  slowly 
moulding  nations  towards  a  higher  state  of 
civilization. 

The  point  of  view  now  suggested  will  per- 
haps be  rendered  somewhat  more  intelligible 
if  we  apply  it  to  the  nineteenth  century,  of 
which  I  have  written  in  such  condemnatory 
terms.  The  preceding  eighteenth  century  was 
undoubtedly  a  somewhat  stationary  epoch, 
of  a  rather  commonplace  character  alike  in 
literature,  in  art,  in  science,  and  in  social 
life.  Its  vices  also  were  low,  its  government 
bad,  its  system  of  punishments  cruel,  and  its 
recognition  of  slavery  degrading.  It  was  a 
kind  of  "dark  age"  between  the  literary  and 
national  brilliance  of  the  Elizabethan  age 

135 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

and   the  wonderful  scientific  and  industrial 
advance  of  the  Victorian  age. 

But  this  latter  period  was  also  a  period  of  a 
great  uprising  of  the  specially  human  virtues 
of  justice,  of  pity,  of  the  love  of  freedom, 
and  of  the  importance  of  education;  and 
though  the  rapid  increase  of  wealth  through 
the  utilization  of  natural  forces  led  to  all 
the  evils  due  to  the  unchecked  growth  of 
individual  riches  and  power,  yet  these  very 
evils  in  all  their  intensity  and  horror  were 
perhaps  necessary  to  excite  in  a  sufficient 
number  of  minds  the  determination  to  get 
rid  of  them.  Time  was  also  required  for  the 
workers  to  learn  their  own  power,  and,  very 
gradually,  to  learn  how  to  use  it.  The  rick- 
burning  and  machine-breaking  of  the  early 
part  of  the  century  have  been  succeeded  by 
combination  and  strikes;  step  by  step  polit- 
ical power  has  been  gained  by  the  masses; 
but  only  now,  in  the  twentieth  century,  are 
they  beginning  to  learn  how  to  use  their 
strength  in  an  effective  manner.  There  are, 
however,  indications  that  the  whole  march 
of  progress  has  been  dangerously  rapid,  and 
it  might  have  been  safer  if  the  great  increases 

136 


Heredity  and  Environment 

of  knowledge  and  the  vast  accumulations  of 
wealth  had  been  spread  over  two  centuries 
instead  of  one.  In  that  case  our  higher 
nature  might  have  been  able  to  keep  pace 
with  the  growing  evils  of  superfluous  wealth 
and  increasing  luxury,  and  it  might  have 
been  possible  to  put  a  check  upon  them 
before  they  had  attained  the  full  power  for 
evil  they  now  possess. 

Nevertheless,  the  omens  for  the  future  are 
good.  The  great  body  of  the  more  intelli- 
gent workers  are  determined  to  have  JUSTICE. 
They  insist  upon  the  abolition  of  monopolies 
of  the  forces  of  nature,  and  upon  the  gradual 
admission  of  all  to  equal  opportunities  for 
labor  by  free  access  to  their  native  soil.  Thus 
may  be  initiated  the  birth  of  a  new  era 
of  peaceful  reform  and  moral  advance- 
ment. 

NOTE. — As  many  of  my  readers  may  not  understand  the  allu- 
sions in  the  second  verse  of  Mr.  Dell's  poem  (pp.  129-130),  I 
append  the  explanation: 

"The  Porch,"  the  place  where  the  Stoic  philosophers  taught 
— The  Painted  Porch  in  Athens. 

"The  Garden,"  scene  of  Plato's  and  Socrates'  teaching. 

Zeno  was  the  founder  of  the  Stoic  philosophy. 

Pyrrho  was  the  founder  of  the  Sceptic  school. 

Philip  of  Macedon  lost  an  eye  at  the  siege  of  Methone  by  a 
slinger's  pebble. 

137 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

Melitus  was  one  of  the  disputants  with  Socrates,  and  was 
always  vanquished  by  him. 

Dionysius,  the  Tyrant  of  Syracuse,  was  also  a  Poet  and  was  a 
candidate  for  the  prize  at  the  Olympic  games,  but  was  conquered 
and  therefore  feared  the  more  skilful  "stylus"  (pen)  of  the 
victors. 

Tyrtaeus,  a  lame  schoolmaster  of  Athens,  inspired  the  Lace- 
daemonians by  his  patriotic  war-songs,  and  thus  contributed 
largely  to  their  victories. 


138 


CHAPTER  XVI 

MORAL  PROGRESS  THROUGH  A  NEW  FORM 
OF  SELECTION 

MANY  readers,  and  some  writers  of  books  on 
organic  evolution,  seem  quite  unaware  that 
Darwin  established  two  modes  of  selection, 
both  alike  "natural"  but  acting  in  different 
ways  and  producing  somewhat  different  re- 
sults. He  termed  the  second  mode  "sexual 
selection,"  and  in  his  Origin  of  Species  he 
briefly  describes  it  as  consisting  in  the  fight- 
ing of  males  for  the  possession  of  females, 
which  undoubtedly  occurs  in  numbers  of  the 
higher  vertebrates  and  also  in  insects. 

But  he  also  includes  under  sexual  selection 
another  mode  of  rivalry  by  the  display  of 
the  special  male  ornaments  of  many  birds, 
and  the  choice  of  the  more  ornamental  by 
the  females.  To  this  latter  phase  he  devotes 
nearly  half  his  volume  on  The  Descent  of  Man, 
and  on  Selection  in  Relation  to  Sex.  Selec- 
tion by  the  fighting  of  males  has  led  to  the 

139 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

development  of  the  stag's  antlers,  the  boar's 
tusks,  and  the  lion's  mane  serving  as  a  shield. 
These  combats  rarely  lead  to  the  death  of  the 
vanquished,  but  to  a  larger  number  of  off- 
spring for  the  victor,  and  this  leads  to  the 
improvement  of  the  race  by  keeping  up  its 
strength,  vigor,  and  fighting  power. 

The  other  form  of  selection,  by  the  display 
of  ornaments  by  male  birds  and  the  sup- 
posed continuous  development  of  those  orna- 
ments by  the  appreciative  choice  of  the 
females,  I  believe  to  be  imaginary.  I  have 
discussed  this  subject  in  many  of  my  books, 
and  my  views  are  now  generally  adopted 
by  evolutionists.  The  fact  that  the  colors 
of  male  insects,  especially  butterflies,  are 
almost  exactly  parallel  to  those  of  birds, 
first  led  me  to  this  conclusion,  because  we 
can  hardly  suppose  insects  to  be  endowed 
with  any  aesthetic  sense,  even  if  they  really 
see  color  at  all,  which,  in  my  last  book,  I 
have  given  strong  reasons  for  doubting. 

But  in  the  human  race  the  conditions 
are  altogether  different;  for  while,  as  I 
have  shown  in  Chapter  XIV,  the  kind  of 
natural  selection  which  through  all  the  ages 

140 


Progress  Through  Selection 

had  moulded  the  infinitely  varied  animal 
forms  into  harmony  with  their  environment 
ceased  to  act  upon  man's  body  and  only 
for  a  limited  time  upon  his  lower  mental 
faculties,  sexual  selection  tended  to  act,  if 
at  all  prejudicially,  through  polygamy,  pros- 
titution, and  slavery,  though  it  possesses 
the  potentiality  of  acting  in  the  future  so  as 
to  ensure  intellectual  and  moral  progress, 
and  thus  elevate  the  race  to  whatever  degree 
of  civilization  and  well-being  it  is  capable  of 
reaching  in  earth-life. 

Eugenics,  or  Race  Improvement  through 
Marriage 

The  total  cessation  of  the  action  of  natural 
selection  as  a  cause  of  improvement  in  our 
race,  either  physical  or  mental,  led  to  the 
proposal  of  the  late  Sir  F.  Galton  to  establish 
a  new  science,  which  he  termed  Eugenics. 
A  society  has  been  formed,  and  much  is 
being  written  about  checking  degeneration 
and  elevating  the  race  to  a  higher  level  by 
its  means.  Sir  F.  Galton's  own  proposals 
were  limited  to  giving  prizes  or  endowments 
for  the  marriage  of  persons  of  high  character, 

141 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

both  physical,  mental,  and  moral,  to  be 
determined  by  some  form  of  inquiry  or 
examination.  This  may,  perhaps,  not  do 
much  harm,  but  it  would  certainly  do  very 
little  good.  Its  range  of  action  would  be 
extremely  limited,  and  so  far  as  it  induced 
any  couples  to  marry  each  other  for  the 
pecuniary  reward,  it  would  be  absolutely 
immoral  in  its  nature,  and  probably  result 
in  no  perceptible  improvement  of  the  race. 

But  there  is  great  danger  in  such  a  process 
of  artificial  selection  by  experts,  who  would 
certainly  soon  adopt  methods  very  different 
from  those  of  the  founder.  We  have  already 
had  proposals  made  for  the  "segregation  of 
the  feeble-minded,"  while  the  "sterilization 
of  the  unfit"  and  of  some  classes  of  crim- 
inals is  already  being  discussed.  This  might 
soon  be  extended  to  the  destruction  of  de- 
formed infants,  as  was  actually  proposed  by 
the  late  Grant  Allen;  while  Mr.  Hiram  M. 
Stanley,  in  a  work  on  Our  Civilization  and 
the  Marriage  Problem,  proposed  more  far- 
reaching  measures.  He  says:  "The  drunkard, 
the  criminal,  the  diseased,  the  morally  weak, 
should  never  come  into  society.  Not  reform, 

142 


Progress  Through  Selection 

but  prevention,  should  be  the  cry."  And  he 
hints  at  the  methods  he  would  adopt,  in  the 
following  passages:  "In  the  true  golden  age, 
which  lies  not  behind  but  before  us,  the 
privilege  of  parentage  will  be  esteemed  an 
honor  for  the  comparatively  few,  and  no 
child  will  be  born  who  is  not  only  sound  in 
body  and  mind,  but  also  above  the  average 
as  to  natural  ability  and  moral  force."  And 
he  concludes:  "The  most  important  matter 
in  society,  the  inherent  quality  of  the  mem- 
bers of  which  it  is  composed,  should  be 
regulated  by  trained  specialists." 
[  Of  course,  our  modern  eugenists  will  dis- 
claim any  wish  to  adopt  such  measures  as 
are  here  hinted  at,  which  are  in  every  way 
dangerous  and  detestable.  But  I  protest 
strenuously  against  any  direct  interference 
with  the  freedom  of  marriage,  which,  as  I 
shall  show,  is  not  only  totally  unnecessary, 
but  would  be  a  much  greater  source  of  danger 
to  morals  and  to  the  well-being  of  humanity 
than  the  mere  temporary  evils  it  seeks  to  cure. 
I  trust  that  all  my  readers  will  oppose  any 
legislation  on  this  subject  by  a  chance  body 
of  elected  persons  who  are  totally  unfitted 

143 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

to  deal  with  far  less  complex  problems  than 
this  one,  and  as  to  which  they  are  sure  to 
bungle  disastrously. 

It  is  in  the  highest  degree  presumptuous 
and  irrational  to  attempt  to  deal  by  com- 
pulsory enactments  with  the  most  vital  and 
most  sacred  of  all  human  relations,  regardless 
of  the  fact  that  our  present  phase  of  social 
development  is  not  only  extremely  imperfect 
but,  as  I  have  already  shown,  vicious  and 
rotten  at  the  core.  How  can  it  be  possible 
to  determine  by  legislation  those  relations 
of  the  sexes  which  shall  be  best  alike  for 
individuals  and  for  the  race,  in  a  society  in 
which  a  large  proportion  of  our  women  are 
forced  to  work  long  hours  daily  for  the  barest 
subsistence,  with  an  almost  total  absence 
of  the  rational  pleasures  of  life,  for  the  want 
of  which  thousands  are  driven  into  wholly 
uncongenial  marriages  in  order  to  secure 
some  amount  of  personal  independence  or 
physical  well-being? 

Let  anyone  consider,  on  the  one  hand, 
the  lives  of  the  wealthy  as  portrayed  in  the 
society  newspapers  of  the  day,  with  their 
endless  round  of  pleasure  and  luxury,  their 

144 


Progress  Through  Selection 

almost  inconceivable  wastefulness  and  extrav- 
agance, indicated  by  the  cost  of  female  dress 
and  the  fact  of  a  thousand  pounds  or  more 
being  expended  on  the  flowers  for  a  single 
entertainment.  On  the  other  hand,  let  him 
contemplate  the  awful  lives  of  millions  of 
workers,  so  miserably  paid  and  with  such 
uncertainty  of  work  that  many  thousands  of 
the  women  and  young  girls  are  driven  on  the 
streets  as  the  only  means  of  breaking  the 
monotony  of  their  unceasing  labor  and  ob- 
taining some  taste  of  the  enjoyments  of  life 
at  whatever  cost;  and  then  ask  himself  if 
the  legislature  which  cannot  remedy  this  state 
of  things  should  venture  to  meddle  with  the 
great  problems  of  marriage  and  the  sanc- 
tities of  family  life.  Is  it  not  a  hideous 
mockery  that  the  successive  governments 
which  for  forty  years  have  seen  the  people 
they  profess  to  govern  so  driven  to  despair 
by  the  vile  conditions  of  their  existence  that 
in  an  ever  larger  and  larger  proportion  they 
seek  death  by  suicide  as  their  only  means  of 
escape — that  governments  which  have  done 
nothing  to  put  an  end  to  this  continuous 
horror  of  starvation  and  suicide  should  be 

145 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

thought  capable  of  remedying  some  of  its 
more  terrible  results,  while  leaving  its  causes 
absolutely  untouched  ? 

It  is  my  firm  conviction,  for  reasons  I 
shall  give  farther  on,  that,  when  we  have 
cleansed  the  Augean  stable  of  our  present 
social  organization,  and  have  made  such 
arrangements  that  all  shall  contribute  their 
share  either  of  physical  or  mental  labor, 
and  that  every  one  shall  obtain  the  full  and 
equal  reward  for  their  work,  the  future 
progress  of  the  race  will  be  rendered  certain 
by  the  fuller  development  of  its  higher  nature 
acted  on  by  a  special  form  of  selection  which 
will  then  come  into  play. 

When  men  and  women  are,  for  the  first 
time  in  the  course  of  civilization,  alike  free 
to  follow  their  best  impulses;  when  idleness 
and  vicious  or  hurtful  luxury  on  the  one 
hand,  oppressive  labor  and  the  dread  of 
starvation  on  the  other,  are  alike  unknown; 
when  all  receive  the  best  and  broadest  educa- 
tion that  the  state  of  civilization  and  knowl- 
edge will  admit;  when  the  standard  of 
public  opinion  is  set  by  the  wisest  and  the 
best  among  us,  and  that  standard  is  system- 

146 


Progress  Through  Selection 

atically  inculcated  on  the  young;  then  we 
shall  find  that  a  system  of  truly  natural  selec- 
tion will  come  spontaneously  into  action 
which  will  steadily  tend  to  eliminate  the 
lower,  the  less  developed,  or  in  any  way 
defective  types  of  men,  and  will  thus  con- 
tinuously raise  the  physical,  moral,  and 
intellectual  standard  of  the  race.  The  exact 
mode  in  which  this  selection  will  operate  will 
now  be  briefly  explained. 

Free 'Selection  in  Marriage 

It  will  be  generally  admitted  that,  although 
many~women  now  remain  unmarried  from 
necessity  rather  than  from  choice,  there  are 
always  considerable  numbers  who  feel  no 
strong  impulse  to  marriage,  and  accept  hus- 
bands to  secure  subsistence  and  a  home  of 
their  own  rather  than  from  personal  affection 
or  strong  sexual  emotion.  In  a  state  of 
society  in  which  all  women  were  econom- 
ically independent,  were  all  fully  occupied 
with  public  duties  and  social  or  intellectual 
pleasures,  and  had  nothing  to  gain  by  mar- 
riage as  regards  material  well-being  or  social 
position,  it  is  highly  probable  that  the  num- 

147 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

bers  of  the  unmarried  from  choice  would 
increase.  It  would  probably  come  to  be 
considered  a  degradation  for  any  woman  to 
marry  a  man  whom  she  could  not  love  and 
esteem,  and  this  reason  would  tend  at  least 
to  delay  marriage  till  a  worthy  and  sym- 
pathetic partner  was  encountered. 

In  man,  on  the  other  hand,  the  passion 
of  love  is  more  general  and  usually  stronger; 
and  in  such  a  society  as  here  postulated 
there  would  be  no  way  of  gratifying  this 
passion  but  by  marriage.  Every  woman, 
therefore,  would  be  likely  to  receive  offers, 
and  a  powerful  selective  agency  would  rest 
with  the  female  sex.  Under  the  system  of 
education  and  public  opinion  here  supposed, 
there  can  be  little  doubt  how  this  selection 
would  be  exercised.  The  idle  or  the  utterly 
selfish  would  be  almost  universally  rejected; 
the  chronically  diseased  or  the  weak  in  intel- 
lect would  also  usually  remain  unmarried,  at 
least  till  an  advanced  period  of  life,  while 
those  who  showed  any  tendency  to  insanity 
or  exhibited  any  congenital  deformity  would 
also  be  rejected  by  the  younger  women,  be- 
cause it  would  be  considered  an  offence 

148 


Progress  Through  Selection 

against  society  to  be  the  means  of  perpetuat- 
ing any  such  diseases  or  imperfections. 

We  must  also  take  account  of  a  special 
factor,  hitherto  almost  unnoticed,  which  would 
tend  to  intensify  the  selection  thus  exercised. 
It  is  a  fact  well  known  to  statisticians  that, 
although  females  are  in  excess  in  almost  all 
civilized  populations,  yet  this  is  not  due  to 
a  law  of  Nature ;  for  with  us,  and  I  believe  in 
all  parts  of  the  Continent,  more  males  than 
females  are  born  to  an  amount  of  about 
3>£  to  4  per  cent.  But  between  the  ages 
of  five  and  thirty-five  there  were,  in  1910, 
4.225  deaths  of  males  from  accident  or  vio- 
lence and  only  1.300  of  females,  showing 
an  excess  of  male  deaths  of  2.925  in  one  year; 
and  for  many  years  the  numbers  of  this  class 
of  deaths  have  not  varied  much,  the  excess 
of  preventable  deaths  of  males  at  those  ages 
being  very  nearly  3,000  annually.  This 
excess  is  no  doubt  due  to  boys  and  young 
men  being  more  exposed,  both  in  play  and 
work,  to  various  kinds  of  accidents  than  are 
womenv.and  this  brings  about  the  constant 
excess  ot  females  in  what  may  be  termed 
normal  civilized  populations. 

149 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

In  1901  it  was  about  a  million;  while  fifty 
years  earlier,  when  the  population  was  about 
half,  it  was  only  359,000,  or  considerably  less 
than  half  the  present  proportion.  This  is 
what  we  should  expect  from  the  constant  in- 
crease of  accidents  and  of  emigration,  the 
effects  of  both  of  which  fall  most  upon  males. 

It  appears,  therefore,  that  the  larger  num- 
ber of  women  in  our  population  today  is  not 
a  natural  phenomenon,  but  is  almost  wholly 
the  result  of  our  own  man-made  social  en- 
vironment. When  the  lives  of  all  our  citizens 
are  accounted  of  equal  value  to  the  com- 
munity, irrespective  of  class  or  of  wealth,  a 
much  smaller  number  will  be  allowed  to  suffer 
from  such  preventable  causes;  while,  as  our 
colonies  fill  up  with  a  normal  population,  and 
the  enormous  areas  of  uncultivated  or  half- 
cultivated  land  at  home  are  thrown  open  to 
our  own  people  on  the  most  favorable  terms, 
the  great  tide  of  emigration  will  be  diminished 
and  will  then  cease  to  affect  the  proportion 
of  the  sexes.  The  result  of  these  various 
causes,  now  all  tending  to  increase  the  num- 
bers of  the  female  population,  will,  in  a  ra- 
tional and  just  system  of  society,  of  which  we 

150 


Progress  Through  Selection 

may  hope  soon  to  see  the  commencement, 
act  in  a  contrary  direction,  and  will  in  a  few 
generations  bring  the  sexes  first  to  an  equality, 
and  later  on  to  a  majority  of  males. 

There  are  some,  no  doubt,  who  will  object 
that,  even  when  women  have  a  free  choice, 
owing  to  improved  economic  conditions,  they 
will  not  choose  wisely  so  as  to  advance  the 
race.  But  no  one  has  the  right  to  make  such 
a  statement  without  adducing  very  strong 
evidence  in  support  of  it.  We  have  for  gen- 
erations degraded  women  in  every  possible 
way;  but  we  now  know  that  such  degradation 
is  not  hereditary,  and  therefore  not  perma- 
nent. The  great  philosopher  and  seer,  Sweden- 
borg,  declared  that  whereas  men  loved  justice, 
wisdom,  and  power  for  their  own  sakes, 
women  loved  them  as  seen  in  the  characters  of 
men.  It  is  generally  admitted  that  there  is 
truth  in  this  observation;  but  there  is  surely 
still  more  truth  in  the  converse,  that  they  do 
not  admire  those  men  who  are  palpably  un- 
just, stupid,  or  weak,  and  still  less  those  who 
are  distorted,  diseased,  or  grossly  vicious, 
though  under  present  conditions  they  are  often 
driven  to  marry  them.  It  may  be  taken 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

as  certain,  therefore,  that  when  women  are 
economically  and  socially  free  to  choose, 
numbers  of  the  worst  men  among  all  classes 
who  now  readily  obtain  wives  will  be  almost 
universally  rejected. 

Now,  this  mode  of  improvement  by  elimina- 
tion of  the  less  desirable  has  many  advantages 
over  that  of  securing  early  marriages  of  the 
more  admired;  for  what  we  most  require  is 
to  improve  the  average  of  our  population  by 
rejecting  its  lower  types  rather  than  by  rais- 
ing the  advanced  types  a  little  higher.  Great 
and  good  men  are  always  produced  in  sufficient 
numbers  and  have  always  been  so  produced 
in  every  phase  of  civilization.  We  do  not 
need  more  of  these  so  much  as  we  want  a 
diminution  of  the  weaker  and  less  advanced 
types.  This  weeding-out  process  has  been 
the  method  of  natural  selection,  by  which  the 
whole  of  the  glorious  vegetable  and  animal 
kingdoms  have  been  developed  and  advanced. 
The  survival  of  the  fittest  is  really  the  ex- 
tinction of  the  unfit;  and  it  is  the  one  bril- 
liant ray  of  hope  for  humanity  that,  just  as 
we  advance  in  the  reform  of  our  present  cruel 
and  disastrous  social  system,  we  shall  set  free 

152 


Progress  Through  Selection 

a  power  of  selection  in  marriage  that  will 
steadily  and  certainly  improve  the  character, 
as  well  as  the  strength  and  the  beauty,  of  our 
race. 

Social  Reform  and  Over-population 
One  of  the  most  general  and  apparently 
the  strongest  of  the  objections  to  any  thorough 
schemes  of  social  reform,  and  especially  to 
those  that  will  abolish  want  and  the  con- 
stant dread  of  starvation  is  that,  in  any  society 
in  which  this  is  done  early  marriages  will  be 
much  more  numerous;  there  will  be  no 
prudential  checks  to  large  families;  and  in  a 
few  generations,  as  Malthus  argued,  popula- 
tions will  increase  beyond  the  means  of  sub- 
sistence. Then  will  commence  a  continual 
decrease  of  well-being,  culminating  in  universal 
poverty,  worse  than  any  that  now  exists, 
because  it  will  be  universal.  The  following 
quotation  from  an  eminent  American  writer 
shows  that  this  fear  has  really  been  felt: 

"If  it  be  true  that  reason  must  direct  the 
course  of  human  evolution,  and  if  it  be  also  true 
that  selection  of  the  fittest  is  the  only  method 
available  for  that  purpose;  then,  if  we  are  to  have 

153 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

any  race-improvement  at  all,  the  dreadful  law 
of  destruction  of  the  weak  and  helpless  must,  with 
Spartan  firmness,  be  carried  out  voluntarily  and 
deliberately.  Against  such  a  course  all  that  is 
best  in  us  revolts."  * 

A  more  recent  writer,  Dr.  W.  M.  Flinders 
Petrie,  the  well-known  Egyptian  explorer, 
has  put  forward  similar  views  in  a  tentative 
manner,  but  clearly  showing  what  he  thinks 
our  present  state  of  society  requires.  Of 
the  compensation  to  workmen  for  accident  he 
says: 

"The  immediate  effect  upon  character  is  to  save 
the  careless,  thoughtless  and  incompetent  from 
the  results  of  their  faults;  this  at  once  reduces 
largely  the  weeding  and  educational  effects  of 
the  bad  qualities." 

And  of  old-age  pensions  his  concluding  re- 
mark is: 

"Nature  knows  of  no  right  to  maintenance,  but 
only  the  necessity  of  getting  rid  of  these  who 
need  it  by  mending  or  ending  them." 

Again,  as  to  the  huge  waste  of  infant  life 

*  Professor  Joseph  Le  Coute,  in  The  Monist,  Vol.  I.,  p.  334. 


Progress  Through  Selection 

now  going  on,  which  he  admits  is  prevent- 
able and  might  be  saved,  he  remarks: 

"We  must  agree  that  it  would  be  of  the  lower, 
or  lowest  type  of  careless,  thriftless,  dirty,  and 
incapable  families  that  the  increase  would  be 
obtained.  Is  it  worth  while  to  dilute  our  in- 
crease of  population  by  10  per  cent,  more  of  the 
more  inferior  kind?" 

And  he  concludes  thus: 

"This  movement  is  doing  away  with  one  of 
the  few  remains  of  natural  weeding  out  of  the 
unfit  that  our  civilization  has  left  us.  And  it 
will  certainly  cause  more  misery  than  happiness 
in  the  course  of  a  century."  * 

The  whole  book  is  full  of  such  statements 
as  the  above,  for  which  neither  facts  nor 
arguments  are  given.  It  is  assumed  through- 
out that  the  failures  in  our  modern  society 
are  so  through  their  own  fault — they  are 
"wastrels" — and  deserve  neither  pity  nor 
help.  He  knows  nothing  apparently  of  Dr. 
Barnardo's  work  in  rescuing  these  "wastrel" 
children  from  the  gutter  and  the  workhouse, 

*  Janus  in  Modern  Life.    By  W.  M.  Flinders  Petrie,  D.C.L., 
F.R.S. 

155 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

treating  them  well  and  kindly,  training  them 
in  work,  and  sending  many  thousands  to 
Canada.  A  record  of  their  subsequent  life 
was  kept,  and  it  was  found  that  very  few 
failed  to  do  well,  while  a  very  large  majority 
became  valuable  citizens  in  their  new  home. 
On  the  whole,  they  were  in  no  way  inferior 
to  the  average  of  emigrants  who  go  at  their 
own  expense,  and  who  are  admitted  to  be 
among  the  best  of  our  workers. 

None  of  the  writers  of  the  class  here  quoted 
seem  to  have  made  themselves  acquainted 
with  the  researches  of  Herbert  Spencer,  Sir 
F.  Galton,  and  others  as  to  the  natural  laws 
which  determine  the  rate  of  increase  of 
population  when  those  laws  are  allowed  to 
operate  freely  under  rational  and  moral  social 
conditions.  A  short  statement  of  these  laws 
will  therefore  be  given. 

In  a  remarkable  essay,  first  published  in 
1852,  H.  Spencer,  with  his  usual  philosophical 
insight,  examined  the  facts  of  reproduction 
and  population  throughout  the  whole  of  the 
animal  kingdom,  and  showed  that  the  dura- 
tion of  the  individual  life  and  the  increase  of 
the  race  varied  inversely,  those  groups  which 

156 


Progress  Through  Selection 

have  the  simplest  organization  and  the  short- 
est lives  producing  the  greatest  number  of 
offspring;  in  other  terms,  individuation  and 
reproduction  are  antagonistic.  But  indi- 
viduation depends  almost  entirely  on  the  de- 
velopment and  specialization  of  the  nervous 
system,  through  which  alone  all  advance  in 
instinct,  emotion,  and  intellect  is  rendered 
possible.  The  actual  rate  of  increase  in  man 
has  been  determined  by  the  necessities  of  the 
savage  state,  in  which,  as  in  most  species  of 
mammals,  it  is  usually  what  is  just  required 
to  maintain  a  limited  average  population. 
But  with  a  true  advance  in  civilization  the 
average  duration  of  life  increases,  and  the 
possible  increase  of  population  under  favor- 
able conditions  becomes  very  great  because 
fertility  is  greater  than  is  needed  under  the 
new  conditions.  At  present,  however,  no 
general  advance  in  intellectuality  has  taken 
place;  but  that  the  facts  do  accord  with  the 
theory  is  indicated  by  the  common  observa- 
tion that  highly  intellectual  parents  do  not 
have  large  families,  while  the  most  rapid 
increase  occurs  in  those  classes  which  are 
engaged  in  healthy  manual  labor. 

157 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

But  a  law  founded  on  such  a  broad  physio- 
logical basis  of  observation  is  sure  to  continue 
in  action,  and  we  may  therefore  feel  certain 
that  as  the  intellectual  level  of  the  whole  race 
is  raised  by  general  culture  and  physical 
health,  the  law  of  diminishing  fertility  will 
act,  and  will  tend  in  the  remote  future  to 
bring  about  an  exact  balance  between  the  rate 
of  increase  and  that  of  mortality. 

A  more  immediate  and  effective  check  to 
rapid  increase  of  population  will,  however,  be 
brought  about  by  the  social  reforms  already 
suggested.  When  poverty  is  abolished  and 
neither  economic  nor  social  advantages  will 
be  gained  by  early  marriage,  there  can  be  no 
doubt  it  will  be  generally  deferred  to  a  later 
age.  Still  more  effective  will  be  the  extension 
of  the  period  of  education  or  training  for  the 
whole  population  for  several  years  longer  than 
at  present,  together  with  the  growth  of  public 
opinion  against  all  marriages  between  per- 
sons who  have  not  yet  begun  the  serious  work 
of  life.  It  would  also  be  an  essential  part  of 
education  to  inculcate  the  delay  of  marriage 
till  every  opportunity  has  been  afforded  both 
of  the  parties  concerned  of  becoming  thor- 

158 


Progress  Through  Selection 

oughly  acquainted  with  each  other  before 
undertaking  so  serious  a  responsibility  as 
marriage  usually  involves. 

The  effect  of  even  a  few  years'  delay  of 
marriage  on  population  is  very  consider- 
able. Sir  F.  Galton  has  shown  from  the  best 
statistics  available  that  if  we  compare  women 
married  at  twenty  with  those  at  twenty- 
nine,  the  comparative  fertility  is  as  8  to  5. 
But  this  does  not  represent  the  whole  effect 
on  increase  of  population.  When  marriage 
is  delayed,  the  time  between  successive  genera- 
tions is  correspondingly  increased;  and  yet 
another  effect  in  the  same  direction  is  pro- 
duced by  the  fact  that  the  greater  the  average 
age  of  marriage  the  fewer  generations  are  alive 
at  the  same  time,  and  it  is  the  combined 
effect  of  these  three  factors  that  determines 
the  actual  increase  of  the  population  due  to 
this  cause. 

Sir  F.  Galton  gives  a  remarkable  table 
showing  this  combined  result  of  these  causes. 
He  finds  that  if  one  hundred  mothers  and  their 
daughters  in  each  successive  generation  marry 
at  twenty,  there  will  be  an  increase  of  such 
mothers  in  each  successive  generation  of 

159 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

1.15.  If,  however,  they  marry  at  twenty- 
nine,  each  successive  generation  of  mothers 
diminishes  in  the  proportion  of  0.85.  If  this 
goes  on  for  108  years,  the  hundred  mothers 
who  marry  at  twenty  have  increased  to  175, 
and  in  216  years  to  299;  while  those  who 
marry  at  twenty-nine  will  have  decreased  to 
6 1  and  38  respectively.  It  is  therefore  shown 
that  under  present  social  conditions  the  age  of 
marriage  necessary  to  preserve  a  stationary 
population  will  be  somewhere  between  twenty 
and  twenty-nine.  The  above  figures  are, 
however,  founded  on  special  cases,  and  the 
actual  facts  are  so  complicated  by  the  number 
of  childless  marriages,  the  rate  of  infantile 
mortality  and  other  causes,  that  they  must  be 
taken  only  as  establishing  a  law  of  rather  rapid 
decrease  of  fertility  with  each  year's  addition 
to  the  average  age  of  marriage  of  the 
mother. 

I  have  now,  I  venture  to  hope,  established 
two  important  principles  in  relation  to  human 
progress.  In  the  first  place,  I  have  shown 
that  modern  ideas  as  to  the  necessity  of  deal- 
ing directly  with  some  of  our  glaring  social 

160 


Progress  Through  Selection 

evils,  such  as  race  degeneration  and  the  va- 
rious forms  of  sexual  immorality,  are  funda- 
mentally wrong  and  are  doomed  to  failure 
so  long  as  their  fundamental  causes — wide- 
spread poverty,  destitution,  and  starvation 
— are  not  greatly  diminished  and  ultimately 
abolished.  I  have  proved  that  human  nature 
is  not  in  itself  such  a  complete  failure  as  our 
modern  eugenists  seem  to  suppose,  but  that 
it  is  influenced  by  fundamental  laws  which 
under  reasonably  just  and  equal  economic 
conditions  will  automatically  abolish  all  these 
evils. 

In  the  second  place,  I  have  shown  that  the 
dread  of  over-population  as  the  result  of  the 
abolition  of  poverty  is  wholly  and  utterly 
fallacious — a  mere  bugbear  created  by  igno- 
rance of  natural  laws  and  of  presumption  in 
thinking  that  we  can  cure  social  evils  while 
leaving  the  man-made  causes  which  produce 
them  unaltered.  The  three  great  natural  laws 
which  all  our  would-be  reformers  ignore 
are: 

(i)  That  a  very  moderate  advance  in  the 
average  age  of  marriage — which  would  cer- 
tainly result  from  a  truly  rational  system  of 

161 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

education  combined  with  economic  equality 
— necessarily  diminishes  the  rate  of  increase 
of  the  population. 

(2)  That   every   approach   to   educational 
and  economic  equality  by  effecting  a  large 
saving  of  the  lives  of  males  who  now  die 
from  preventable  causes,  combined  with  the 
fact  that  male  births  exceed  those  of  females, 
would  so  diminish  the  number  of  the  latter 
that  they  would   soon  become  less  instead 
of,  as  now,  more  than  that  of  males:  that  this 
would  give  them  an  effective  choice  in  marriage 
which  they  do  not  now  possess,  together  with 
the  power  of  delay  which  for  many  reasons 
large  numbers  of  them  would  exercise. 

(3)  The  law  of  diminishing  fertility  with 
increase  of  brain-work  through  education  and 
training  would  further  tend  to  the  diminution 
of  fertility. 

These  three  natural  causes  all  tend  in  one 
direction — the  equality  of  births  with  deaths, 
while  their  action  would  be  so  readily  modified 
by  public  opinion  as  to  obviate  all  danger  of 
either  increase  or  decrease  beyond  what  was 
necessary  for  the  well-being  of  each  com- 
munity, nation,  or  race. 

162 


Progress  Through  Selection 


The  Future  Status  of  Woman 

The  foregoing  statement  of  the  effect  of 
established  natural  laws,  if  allowed  free  play 
under  rational  conditions  of  civilization,  clear- 
ly indicates  that  the  position  of  woman  in 
the  not  distant  future  will  be  far  higher  and 
more  important  than  any  which  has  been 
claimed  for  or  by  her  in  the  past. 

While  she  will  be  conceded  full  political  and 
social  rights  on  an  equality  with  man,  she  will 
be  placed  in  a  position  of  responsibility  and 
power  which  will  render  her  his  superior,  since 
the  future  moral  progress  of  the  race  will  so 
largely  depend  upon  her  free  choice  in 
marriage.  As  time  goes  on,  and  she  acquires 
more  and  more  economic  independence,  that 
alone  will  give  her  an  effective  choice  which  she 
has  never  had  before.  But  this  choice  will 
be  further  strengthened  by  the  fact  that,  with 
ever-increasing  approach  to  equality  of  op- 
portunity for  every  child  born  in  our  country, 
that  terrible  excess  of  male  deaths,  in  boy- 
hood and  early  manhood  especially  due  to 
various  preventable  causes,  will  disappear, 

163 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

and  change  the  present  majority  of  women 
to  a  majority  of  men.  This  will  lead  to  a 
greater  rivalry  for  wives,  and  will  give  to 
women  the  power  of  rejecting  all  the  lower 
types  of  character  among  their  suitors. 

It  will  be  their  special  duty  so  to  mould 
public  opinion,  through  home  training  and 
social  influence,  as  to  render  the  women  of 
the  future  the  regenerators  of  the  entire 
human  race.  We  hope  and  believe  that  they 
will  be  fully  equal  to  the  high  and  respon- 
sible position  which,  in  accordance  with 
natural  laws,  they  will  be  called  upon  to 
fulfil. 

The  certainty  that  this  powerful  selective 
agency  will  come  into  existence  just  in  pro- 
portion as  we  reform  our  existing  social  system 
by  the  abolition  of  poverty  and  the  establish- 
ment of  full  equality  of  opportunity  in  educa- 
tion and  economic  position,  demonstrates  that 
Nature — or  the  Universal  Mind — has  not 
failed  or  bungled  our  world  so  completely 
as  to  require  the  weak  and  ignorant  efforts 
of  the  eugenists  to  set  it  right,  while  leav- 
ing the  great  fundamental  causes  of  all 

existing    social    evils    absolutely    untouched. 

164 


Progress  Through  Selection 

Let  them  devote  all  their  energies  to  purify- 
ing this  whitened  sepulchre  of  destitution 
and  ignorance,  and  the  beneficent  laws  of 
human  nature  will  themselves  bring  about 
the  physical,  intellectual,  and  moral  advance- 
ment of  our  race. 


165 


CHAPTER  XVII 

HOW  TO  INITIATE  AN  ERA  OF  MORAL 
PROGRESS 

IN  Chapters  VIII  to  XII  of  this  volume  I 
have  given  in  briefest  outline  a  summary 
of  the  growth  during  the  nineteenth  century 
of  the  actual  social  environment  in  the  midst 
of  which  we  live. 

We  see  a  continuous  advance  of  man's 
power  to  utilize  the  forces  of  Nature,  to  an 
extent  which  surpasses  everything  he  had  been 
able  to  do  during  all  the  preceding  centuries 
of  his  recorded  history. 

We  also  see  that  the  result  of  this  vast 
economic  revolution  has  been  almost  wholly 
evil. 

We  see  that  this  hundredfold  increase  of 
wealth,  amply  sufficient  to  provide  neces- 
saries, comforts,  and  all  beneficial  refinement, 
and  luxuries  for  our  whole  population,  has 
been  distributed  with  such  gross  injustice 
that  the  actual  condition  of  those  who  produce 
all  this  wealth  has  become  worse  and  worse, 

166 


An  Era  of  Moral  Progress 

no  efficient  arrangements  having  been  made 
that  from  the  overflowing  abundance  pro- 
duced all  should  receive  the  mere  essentials 
of  a  healthy  and  happy  existence. 

We  have  seen  huge  cities  grow  up,  every 
one  of  them  with  their  overcrowded,  insani- 
tary slums,  where  men,  women,  and  chil- 
dren die  prematurely  as  surely  as  though  a 
body  of  secret  poisoners  were  constantly  at 
work  to  destroy  them. 

We  see  thousands  of  girls  compelled  by 
starvation  to  work  in  such  an  empoisoned 
environment  as  to  produce  horribly  painful 
and  disfiguring  disease,  which  is  often  fatal 
in  early  youth,  or  in  what  ought  to  have  been, 
and  what  might  have  been,  the  period  of 
maximum  enjoyment  of  their  womanhood. 
And  to  this  very  day  no  efficient  steps  have 
been  taken  to  abolish  these  conditions. 

We  see  millions  still  struggling  in  vain  for 
a  sufficiency  of  the  bare  necessaries  of  life 
(which  in  their  misery  is  all  they  ask),  often 
culminating  in  actual  starvation,  or  in  suicide, 
to  which  they  are  driven  by  the  dread  of  star- 
vation. Yet  our  Governments,  selected  from 
among  the  most  educated,  the  most  talented, 

167 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

the  wealthiest  of  the  country,  with  absolute 
power  to  make  what  laws  and  regulations  they 
please,  and  an  overflowing  fund  of  accumu- 
lated wealth  to  draw  upon,  do  nothing,  al- 
though more  people  die  annually  of  want  than 
are  killed  in  a  great  war,  and  more  children 
than  could  be  slaughteredb  y  many  Herods, 
And  while  all  this  goes  on  in  the  depths, 
where — 

"Pale  anguish  keeps  the  heavy  gate, 
And  the  Warder  is  Despair" — 

a  little  higher  up,  among  the  middle-men 
distributors  of  the  necessaries  and  luxuries 
of  life,  bribery,  adulteration,  and  various 
forms  of  petty  dishonesty  are  rampant. 

And  higher  yet,  among  the  great  Capital- 
ists, the  merchant  Princes,  the  Captains  of  in- 
dustry, we  find  hard  taskmasters  who  drive 
down  wages  below  the  level  of  bare  subsist- 
ence, and  who  support  a  more  gigantic  and 
widespread  system  of  gambling  than  the  world 
has  ever  seen. 

And,  finally,  our  administration  of  what  we 
call  "Justice"  (and  of  which  we  are  so  proud 
because  our  judges  cannot  be  bribed)  is  ut- 

163 


An  Era  of  Moral  Progress 

terly  unjust,  because  it  is  based  on  a  system 
of  money  fees  at  every  step ;  because  it  is  so 
cumbrous  and  full  of  technicalities  as  to  need 
the  employment  of  attorneys  and  counsel  at 
great  cost,  and  because  all  petty  offences  are 
punishable  by  fine  or  imprisonment,  which 
makes  poverty  itself  a  crime  while  it  allows 
those  with  money  to  go  practically  free. 

Taking  account  of  these  various  groups  of 
undoubted  facts,  many  of  which  are  so  gross, 
so  terrible,  that  they  cannot  be  overstated,  it  is 
not  too  much  to  say  that  our  whole  system  of 
society  is  rotten  from  top  to  bottom,  and  the 
Social  Environment  as  a  whole,  in  relation  to 
our  possibilities  and  our  claims,  is  the  worst 
that  the  world  has  ever  seen. 

Such  are  the  evil  products  of  the  social 
environment  we  have  ourselves  created  in  the 
course  of  a  single  century.  We  have  seen  it 
going  from  bad  to  worse,  and  have  applied 
petty  remedies  here  and  there  during  the  whole 
period;  but  the  evils  have  continued  to  in- 
crease. It  has  now  become  clear  to  the  more 
intelligent  of  the  workers  that  if  we  wish  to 
improve  it — if  we  wish  to  prevent  it  from 
getting  even  worse  than  it  is — we  must  deal 

169 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

with  the  root-causes  of  the  evil  and,  so  far  as 
possible,  reverse  the  conditions  which  are  so 
demonstrably  bad,  such  hideous  failures.  And 
fortunately,  this  is  by  no  means  so  difficult 
as  it  may  seem  to  be,  because  a  large  body  of 
our  thinkers  and  a  considerable  number  of 
our  workers  see  clearly  what  these  root-causes 
are,  and,  less  clearly,  how  to  remedy  them. 
They  will,  however,  give  their  energetic  sup- 
port to  any  Government  that  devotes  itself 
to  the  task  of  remedying  them.  The  follow- 
ing are  my  own  views  as  to  how  the  problem 
must  be  attacked  in  order  to  solve  it  thorough- 
ly and  permanently. 

The  Root-cause  and  the  Remedy 

If  we  review  with  care  the  long  train  of 
social  evils  which  have  grown  up  during  the 
nineteenth  century,  we  shall  find  that  every 
one  of  them,  however  diverse  in  their  nature 
and  results,  is  due  to  the  same  general  cause, 
which  may  be  defined  or  stated  in  a  variety 
of  different  ways: 

(i)  They  are  due,  broadly  and  generally, 
to  our  living  under  a  system  of  universal 
competition  for  the  means  of  existence,  the 

170 


An  Era  of  Moral  Progress 

remedy  for  which  is  equally  universal  co- 
operation. 

(2)  It  may  be  also  defined  as  a  system  of 
economic  antagonism,  as  of  enemies,  the  rem- 
edy being  a  system  of  economic  brotherhood, 
as  of  a  great  family,  or  of  friends. 

(3)  Our  system  is  also  one  of  monopoly 
by  a  few  of  all  the  means  of  existence:   the 
land,  without  access  to  which  no  life  is  possible ; 
and  capital,  or  the  results  of  stored-up  labor, 
which  is  now  in  the  possession  of  a  limited 
number  of  capitalists  and  therefore  is  also  a 
monopoly.    The  remedy  is  freedom  of  access 
to  land  and  capital  for  all. 

(4)  Also,  it  may  be  defined  as  social  in- 
justice,  inasmuch  as  the  few  in  each  genera- 
tion  are   allowed    to   inherit   the   stored-up 
wealth  of  all  preceding  generations,  while  the 
many   inherit  nothing.     The   remedy  is   to 
adopt  the  principle  of  equality  of  opportunity 
for   all,   or  of  universal   inheritance   by  the 
State  in  trust  for  the  whole  community. 

These  four  statements  of  the  existing  causes 
of  all  our  social  evils  cannot,  I  believe,  be 
controverted,  and  the  remedies  for  them 
may  be  condensed  into  one  general  proposi- 

171 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

tion:  that  it  is  the  first  duty  (in  importance) 
of  a  civilized  Government  to  organize  the 
labor  of  the  whole  community  for  the  equal 
good  of  all;  but  it  is  also  their  first  duty 
(in  time)  to  take  immediate  steps  to  abolish 
death  by  starvation  and  by  preventable  disease 
due  to  insanitary  dwellings  and  dangerous 
employments,  while  carefully  elaborating  the 
permanent  remedy  for  want  in  the  midst  of 
wealth. 

I  myself  have  pointed  out  how  these  two 
ends  may  be  best  achieved,  and  hope  to 
elaborate  them.  In  the  meantime,  I  call 
attention  to  Mr.  Standish  O'Grady's  letter, 
"To  the  Leaders  of  Labor,"  in  The  New  Age 
of  November  21, 1912,  in  which,  after  referring 
to  the  very  natural  dread  by  the  rich  of  any 
such  radical  reorganization  of  society,  as 
leading  to  their  own  financial  ruin  (which  it 
certainly  need  not  do),  he  makes  the  follow- 
ing suggestive  statement,  with  which  I  hope 
all  my  readers  will  agree: 

"But  what  they  fail  to  perceive  is,  that,  in  a 
world  like  this,  made  by  infinite  goodness  and  wis- 
dom, Right  is  always  the  great  stand-by  for  men 

172 


An  Era  of  Moral  Progress 

and  for  Nations,  and  for  the  rich  as  well  as  for 
the  poor;  and  that  Wrong,  sooner  or  later,  ends 
in  misery  and  destruction." 

That  is  sound  moral  teaching.  We  have 
been  doing  tKe  #rong  for  the  past  century, 
and  we  have  reaped,  and  are  reaping,  "misery 
and  destruction/'  It  is  time  that  we  changed 
our  methods,  which  are  all  (as  I  think  I  have 
sufficiently  pointed  out)  fundamentally  wrong, 
radically  unjust,  wholly  immoral. 

We  have  ourselves  created  an  immoral 
or  unmoral  social  environment.  To  undo  its 
inevitable  results  we  must  reverse  our  course. 
We  must  see  that  all  our  economic  legislation, 
all  our  social  reforms,  are  in  the  very  opposite 
direction  to  those  hitherto  adopted,  and  that 
they  tend  in  the  direction  of  one  or  other  of 
the  four  fundamental  remedies  I  have  sug- 
gested. In  this  way  only  can  we  hope  to 
change  our  existing  immoral  environment 
into  a  moral  one,  and  initiate  a  new  era  of 
Moral  Progress. 

In  Chapters  XIII  to  XVI  I  have  shown 
that  the  well-established  laws  of  evolution 
as  they  really  apply  to  mankind  are  all 

173 


Environment  and  Moral  Progress 

favorable  to  the  advance  of  true  civilization 
and  of  morality.  Our  existing  competitive 
and  antagonistic  social  system  alone  neutral- 
izes their  beneficent  operation.  That  system 
must  therefore  be  radically  changed  into  one 
of  brotherly  co-operation  and  co-ordination 
for  the  equal  good  of  all.  To  succeed  we  must 
make  this  principle  our  guide  and  our  pole- 
star  in  all  social  legislation. 


THE  END 


174 


Index 


ACQUIRED   characters,   defini- 
tion of,  116 

characters,  on  the  hered- 
ity of,  115 
Adaptation,  118 
Adulteration,  64 
Alcoholism,  deaths  from,  77 
in  women,  78 
statistics  of,  78 
America,  Central,  architecture 

of,  44 
Animals,      natural      selection 

among,  85 

Anthropological  Review,  in 
Apes,  anthropoid,  affinity  with 

man,  104 
Aquatic  forms  of  life,  increase 

of,  95 

Archimedes,  43 

Australian    aborigines,    char- 
acter of,  42 
and  Caucasians,  43 

BARNARDO,  Dr.,  155 

Beaver,  106 

Bimana,  105 

Brahe,  Tycho,  30 

Brain  as  organ  of  the  mind,  105 

Bribery,  64 

Browning's,  Mrs.,   Cry  of  the 

Children,  51 
Buddha,  14 


CAPITALISM,  168 

Caucasians     and     Australian, 
aborigines,  43 

Causes  of  economic  evils,  170 

Chambers's    Vestiges  of  Crea- 
tion, 92 

Character,  definition  of,  10 
difficulty  of  knowing  good 

from  bad,  II         * 
mental  faculties  and,  1 1 
morality  based  upon,  1 1 
not  cumulative,  46 
of  savage  races,  41 
permanence  of,  14 
public  opinion  and,  45 
selective   agency    to    im- 
prove, 45 

subject  to  variation,  45 
transmission  of,  10,  13,  45 
variability  and,  92 

Characters,   acquired,    defini- 
tion of,  116 

acquired,  heredity  of,  115 
innate,  116,  122 
heredity  of,  122 

Chemical  trades,  evils  of,  59 

Child  labor,  evils  of,  50,  51 

Church,  the  work  of  the,  130 

Civil  law  system,  72 

Civilization  during  eighteenth 

century,  49 
evolution  and,  173 


175 


Index 


Civilization  of  ancient  Egypt, 

22,44 

of  ancient  India,  14 
of  ancient  Mesopotamia, 

23 

Civilization,  ancient,  124 
Classical  writers,  our  indebted- 
ness to,  129 

Coal  mines,  accidents  in,  52 
child  labor  in,  52 
female  workers  in,  52 
Coal  mines,  insecurity  in,  52 
whom  the,  belong  to,  54 
Commercial  system,  immoral- 
ity of  our,  64 
Companies,  Limited  Liability, 

66 

Competition,  170 
Conduct,  character  and,  II 

environment  and,  12 
Confucius,  14 

Cook,  Captain,  opinion  of,  on 
natives  of  Friendly  Isles, 

41 

Co-operation,  170 
Criminal  law  system,  74 
Cruciferae  family,  increase  of, 

95 

Curr,  Mr.,  opinion  of,  on  Aus- 
tralian aborigines,  42 

Cutlery  trade,  evils  of,  59 

Daily  Citizen,  quoted,  60,  6 1 
Darwin  and  heredity,  115 

and  natural  selection,  98, 

104,  139 

and  transference  of  selec- 
tion to  mind,  in 

and  variability,  92 

on  Tahitians,  41 


Darwin's  Descent  of  Man,  104, 

139 

Origin  of  Species,  92 
theory  of  Pangenesis,  116 
Darwinism  and  Lamarckism, 

88,91 

and  variability,  93 
objections  to,  95,  IOO 
(See  also  Evolution,  Lam- 
arckism, Natural  selec- 
tion, etc.) 
Deadly  trades,  59 
Dell's,  J.   H.,  Dawning  Grey 

quoted,  129 
Descent  of  Man,  Darwin's,  104, 

139 
Divine  influx  into  man,  102, 

127,  131 
Divorce,  84 

Dutt,  Mr.  Romesh,  quoted,  15 
Dwellings,  insanitary,  56 

ECONOMIC  advance, evilsof,  166 

antagonism,  171 

brotherhood,  171 

evils,  causes  of,  170 

remedies  for,  170 
Education,  effects  of,  not  her- 
editary, 123,  127 

extension  of  period  of,  158 

national  system  of,  needed, 
161 

of  the  world,  123 
Egypt,  astronomy  in  ancient, 

«5 

civilization  of  ancient,  22, 

44 

intellect  in  ancient,  23 
Eighteenth  century,  stationary 
epoch,  49,  135 


176 


Index 


Elephants,  increase  of,  95 

Environment,  laws  of  heredity 

and,  115 

modified  by  man,  106 
not  always  responsible  for 

specialization,  118 
remedies,  170 
social,  and  conduct,  12 
social,  character  of,  169 
social,   during  nineteenth 

century,  49 

social,  evils  of,  causes  of, 
170 

Equality  of  opportunity,  171 

Erman,  Prof.  Adolf,  quoted,  34 

Euclid,  43 

Eugenics,  method  of,  141 

science  of,  established  by 
Sir  F.  Galton,  141 

Eugenists,  164 

Evil,  origin  of,  problem  of,  131 
possible  solution  of,  132 

Evolution,  a  rational  theory,  91 
acceptance  of,  91 
and  civilization,  157 
Lamarckism  and,  91 
Chambers  and,  91 
Darwin  and,  91 
exposition  of,  by  Spencer, 

9i 

natural  selection  and,  87 
objections  to,  91,  100 
Evolution  variability  of  species, 

14,93 
(See      also      Darwinism, 

Lamarckism,     Natural 

selection,  etc.) 


FACTORY  system,  development 
of,  50 


Factory  system,  evils  of,  50 
Fertility,  law  of  diminishing, 

159,  163 

Fines  v.  imprisonment,  75 
Friendly  Isles,  natives  of,  char- 
acter of,  41 

GALTON,  SIR  FRANCIS,  46 
eugenic  theory  of,  141 
on  laws  of  increase  of  pop- 
ulation, 141 

Galvanizing  trade,  evils  of,  60 

Gambling,  immorality  of,  68 
in  trade,  67 

inconsistent  attitude  to,  68 
Stock  Exchange,  70 

Genius,  not  cumulative,  46 
not  necessarily  hereditary, 
46;  examples,  47 

Gothic  architecture,  43 

Greece,  134 

architecture  of  ancient,  43 

HEREDITY  and  genius,  46 

and   "recession  to  medi- 
ocrity," 47 

beneficence  of  law  of,  127 
Darwin  and,  115 
importance  of  subject,  115 
Lamarck  and,  116 
laws  of,  and  environment, 

115 

misconceptions  regarding, 

"5 

of  innate  characters,  122 
Herschel,  Sir  John,  92 
Homer,  14 
Hominidse,  105 

Human   nature,    faculties  of, 
112 


177 


Index 


IMPRISONMENT  v.  fines,  75. 
India,  architecture  of  ancient, 

44 
intelligence  and  morality 

in  ancient,  15,  17,  22 
religious    conceptions    in 

ancient,  17 
Individuation,  157 
Infantile  mortality,  Prof. 

Petrie  on,  154 
statistics  of,  57,  82 
Injustice,  social,  171 
Innate  characters,  117 

heredity  of,  123 
Insanitary  dwellings,  56 
Intellect  in  ancient  India,  15, 

17,22 

permanence  of,  22 
Intellectual  advance  not  gen- 
eral, 157 

JESUS  CHRIST,  129 
Justice,  administration  of,  72 
immorality  of,  75,  168 

LAMARCK  and  evolution,  91 
and  heredity,  116 

Lamarckism,  88,  100 
and  Darwinism,  88 
insufficiency  of,  as  a  theory, 
90 

Land,  access  to,  171 

Language,  36 

diversity  of,  133 
lowest  races  possess,  40 

Law,  civil,  system,  72 
criminal,  system,  74 
partiality  of  the,  75 

Layard,  Sir  H.,  23 

Le  Coute,  Prof.,  quoted,  153 


Lead  glaze  trade,  evils  of,  59 
Lead  poisoning  of  workers,  60 
Life-destroying  trades,  56 
Lyell's   Principles   of  Geology 
quoted,  89 

MAHA-BHARATA,  Indian  epic, 

quoted,  14 
Malthus,  153 
Mammals,     classification     of, 

105 

Man,  affinity  of,  with  anthro- 
poid apes,  104 

and  marriage,  147 

dignity  of,  102 

Divine   influx   into,    103, 
128,  132 

external     differences    be- 
tween, and  apes,  104 

modifies  his  ^environment, 
106 

moral  sense  in,  102 

nature  of,  stationary,  IO2 

position  of,  102 

predominance  of  mind  in, 
109 

preparation  of,  for  prog- 
ress, 133 

selection    transferred    to 
mind  in,  1 10 

three  great  races  of,  in 

triumph  of,  over  Nature, 

106,  166 
Marriage,  158 

freedom  of,  insisted  upon, 

143 

man  and,  148 
women  and,  147 
Mental  faculties  in  formation 
of  character,  1 1 


178 


Index 


Mesopotamia,    civilization   of 

ancient,  23 1 
Mind,  brain  the  organ  of  the, 

105 
predominance  of,  in  man, 

109 
selection  transferred  to,  in 

man,  no 

Monier- Williams,  Sir  M.,  17 
Monopoly,  171 
Moral  degradation,  indications 

of,  77 

progress,  definition  of,  7 
progress,  initiating  new  era 

of,  166 
progress  through  new  form 

of  selection,  139 
sense  in  man,  102 
Morality  among  the  ancients, 

14 

Morality,  based  upon  character, 

n 
based  upon  human  nature, 

10 

evolution  and,  173 
in  ancient  India,  15 
no  definite  advance  in,  45 
product  of  environment,  9 
savages  and,  40 
standards  of,  varying,  8 

Morals,  definition  of,  7 

NATURAL  selection,  among  ani- 
mals, 85 

and  evolution,  87 
and  origin  of  species,  92 
explanation  of,  85,  98 
modification  of,  by  man, 

107,  ill 
modified  by  mind,  104 


Natural  selection,    new  form 

of,  139 

process  of,  124 
two  modes  of,  139 
Nineteenth  century,  environ- 

ment^during,  49 
movements  during,  135 
reaction     against     forced 
civilization  during,  50 

O'GRADY,  MR.  S.,  quoted,  172 
Oliver's,   Sir  T.,   Diseases    of 

Occupation,  62 
Organic  nature,   development 

of,  121 

indivisibility  of,  12 1 
Origin   of  Species,    Darwin's, 

essential  features  of,  92 
Origin     of     species,     natural 

selection  essential  factor 

in,  92 

Overcrowding,  statistics  of,  57 
Owen,  Sir  Richard,  and  man's 

affinity  with  apes,  105 

Pall  Mall  Gazette,  reply  to,  86 

Pangenesis,  theory  of,  116 

Park,  Mungo,  112 

Petrie,  Prof.,  quoted,  154 

Plato,  8,  129 

Poor  Law,  immorality  of  the, 

75 

Population,  increase  of,  laws 

governing,  156 
social  reform  and,  153 

Poverty,  145,  158,  167 

Polynesian  races,  character  of, 
42 

Preventable  deaths,  responsi- 
bility for,  52 


179 


Index 


Primates,  105 

Proctor,  Mr.  R.   A.,  quoted, 

25 

Progress,  moral,  definition  of,  7 
moral,  how  to  initiate  era 

of,  1 66 
moral,  through  new  form 

of  selection,  139 
Prostitution,  83 
Pyramid  of  Gizeh  as  observa- 
tory, 30 
purpose  of,  24 
structure  of,  26 

QUADRUMANA,  IO5 

RAWLINSON,  23 

Reade's  Martyrdom  of  Man, 
126 

"Recession  to  mediocrity," 
heredity  and,  47 

Religious  conceptions  in  an- 
cient India,  17 

Remedies  for  economic  evils, 
170 

Reproduction,  156 

Rich,  dread  of,  to  social  reor- 
ganization, 172 

Rome,  134 

SAVAGE  races,  morality  of,  40 
Selection,  artificial,  117,  141 

free,  in  marriage,  147 
Selection,   natural,   action  of, 

transferred  to  mind  in 

man,  in 

among  animals,  85 
Selection,  natural,  and  origin 

of  species,  92 
explanation  of,  85,  98 


Selection,  natural,  modification 

of,  by  man,  107,  in 
modified  by  mind,  104 
process  of,  124 
two  modes  of,  139 
Selection,  new  form  of,  139 

sexual,  139 
Selective  agency  to   improve 

character,  45 

Sherard's,  Mr.  R.  H.,  White 
Slaves  of  England,  60 
(note) 

Slavery,  8,  127 
Slums,  56,  167 

Smyth,  Piazzi,  on  Pyramids,  25 
Snowden,  Philip,  62 
Social  environment  and  con- 
duct, 12 

character  of,  169 
during  nineteenth'century , 

49 

evils  of,  causes  and  reme- 
dies of,  170 
reorganization,    the    rich 

and,  172 

reform,    158;    and    over- 
population, 153 
Socrates,  14 
Species,  increase  of,  92,  95 

origin  of,  natural  selection, 

and,  92 

variability  of,  92 
Speech  as  proof  of  intelligence, 

36 

lowest  races  possess,  40 
origin  and  development  of, 

37 

Spencer,  Herbert,  100,  in,  115 
exposition  of  evolutionary 
argument  by,  91 


180 


Index 


Spencer,  Herbert,  onlaws  of 
increase  of  population, 
156 

Stanley  Hiram  M.f  quoted,  142 
Struggle  for  existence,  96,  97 
Suicide,  statistics  of,  80 
Survival  of  the  fittest,  96,  98, 

153 

"Survival  value,"  48 
Swedenborg,  151 

TAHITI ANS,  character  of,  41 
Tinning  trade,  evils  of,  60 

UNHEALTHY  trades,  59 
Universe,  development  and  pur- 
pose of,  132 

VARIABILITY,  character  and,  45 
basic  law  of  nature,  105 
explanation  of,  92 


Variability,  of  species,  92 

purpose  of,  101 
Vedas,  quoted,  17 

WAR,  84 

Wealth,  increase  of,  50 
Webb,  Mr.  Sidney,  quoted,  166 
Women  and  marriage,  147 
excess  in  numbers  of,  148, 

163 

future  status  of,  163 
in  trade,  167 
Workmen'scompensation,  Prof. 

Petrie  on,  167 

Writing   as   proof   of   intelli- 
gence, 36 

origin  and  development  of, 
37 

ZOOPHYTES,  106 
Zymotic  diseases,  56 


181 


THIS  BOOK  IS  DUE  ON  THE  LAST  DATE 
STAMPED  BELOW 

AN  INITIAL  FINE  OF  25  CENTS 

WILL  BE  ASSESSED  FOR  FAILURE  TO  RETURN 
THIS  BOOK  ON  THE  DATE  DUE.  THE  PENALTY 
WILL  INCREASE  TO  SO  CENTS  ON  THE  FOURTH 
DAY  AND  TO  $1.OO  ON  THE  SEVENTH  DAY 
OVERDUE. 


MAR  24  193S 


JAN  1 9  1984 


rwdcirc.  JAW    6 


LD  21-100m-7,'33 


YC  07935 


1 


tf/f 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  I/IBRARY 


